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5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 93 | https://swsg.org/be-a-woman-of-substance/ | en | Be a "Woman of Substance" | [
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] | 2011-08-01T13:02:00+00:00 | How to be a "Woman of Substance." | en | Strong Women Strong Girls | https://swsg.org/be-a-woman-of-substance/ | A woman of substance is a woman of power, a woman of positive influence and a woman of meaning. To be branded a woman of substance is one of the greatest compliments one can give a woman that wants to be an “influential” female. Below, I have assembled four qualities a girl/woman should possess in order to become a “woman of substance.”
Embrace your individuality and be happy the way you are
The pressure put on women in today’s society is immense and I admire any female out there who doesn’t let the high demands and expectations get them down. In my experience, I have learned that we, as women, should not let the likes of “perfected” images or “criticism” affect us and It has came as such a relief to me to realize that being different and imperfect is far more interesting than being a “perfect” person. I believe that being yourself and feeling happy as yourself- just the way you are signifies the word “beauty.”
Use your voice
We were all blessed with voices to use them- so use them! I’m a relatively quiet person and a woman of not many words who next to never will indulge in small talk chit chat. It’s just who I am. However, on the other hand, when it comes to standing up for what I believe in or voicing my opinions on things, I never fail to make use of my voice. And neither shall you! Make use of what god has given you and say what you think, say what you believe in, and argue against what you don’t.
Find your dream in life and pursue it
Follow your heart…never give up…and you can do anything. We all have the ability to do whatever it is we want to do and fulfill any dream we want to fulfill; we just have to go and do it. When you find your passion in life, it creates a meaning in your life and gives you a purpose in the world: it generates happiness.
Live up to your morals and values- always remain aware of them
Living by your morals and values in life; inspires you, motivates you and energizes you for doing something significant in the world. As children, we were always being told to be a person of moral and were educated to understand what our values are. I think, when we grow older we seem to loose or forget about those crucial qualities and in order for us to be descent human beings, we should consider re-educating ourselves on morals and values.
Are you inspired by what it means to be a woman of substance? Help us inspire more women & girls. DONATE today. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 67 | https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/movies-that-will-transport-you-to-paris | en | 39 Movies That Will Transport You to Paris | [
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] | 2020-05-29T12:41:58.100000-04:00 | From "An American in Paris" to "Ratatouille," here are 39 movies set in Paris that will transport you to the banks of the Seine—no plane ticket required. | en | https://www.cntraveler.com/verso/static/conde-nast-traveler/assets/favicon.ico | Condé Nast Traveler | https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/movies-that-will-transport-you-to-paris | All products and listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you purchase something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
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39 Movies That Will Transport You to Paris
Musicals, mysteries, and a whole lot of Audrey Hepburn.
Paris has inspired every type of artist over the years, from Impressionist painters to literary giants. But the city perhaps shines the brightest on the big screen, serving as the backdrop to countless movies over the past century. Even before French directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut launched a cinematic movement in the 1960s, Hollywood showcased the beauty of Paris in breezy musicals and romances. And since then, we've seen the city shine in animated films, white-knuckle thrillers, gritty biopics, and more. Regardless of the genre, one thing's for sure: The City of Light sure knows how to steal a scene. From Amélie to Ratatouille, here are 39 movies that will transport you to Paris—no plane ticket required.
All products and listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you purchase something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 2 | https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/03/pretty-woman-original-ending | en | The True Story of Pretty Woman’s Original Dark Ending | [
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] | 2015-03-23T15:10:03.121000-04:00 | As the classic rom-com turns 25, screenwriter J.F. Lawton looks back on how his gritty screenplay got turned into a fairy tale—and why he thinks it’s the best thing that could have happened. | en | https://www.vanityfair.com/verso/static/vanity-fair-global/assets/favicon.ico | Vanity Fair | https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/03/pretty-woman-original-ending | Over the past three decades, the story behind the original Pretty Woman script—how it was dark, how it didn’t have a happy ending, how it wasn’t really the kind of property anyone would ever expect Disney to go for—has been flattened out into the kind of narrative that’s literally trivial, a footnote in the history of a wildly successful and deeply beloved film. The most popular version of the story (and the one that shows up on both the film’s Wikipedia and IMDb pages, tossed off as a minor footnote in a far larger and longer saga) holds that executive producer Laura Ziskin was the one that demanded that the Garry Marshall–directed film have a feel-good ending, turning the film from a dark drama to another Disney fairy tale—albeit one with a modern twist.
“I didn't want a movie whose message would be that some nice guy will come along and give you nice clothes and lots of money and make you happy,” Ziskin said in a 1991 People magazine article, which credits her for changing the film’s ending with addition of the line “She rescues him right back.”
That’s not exactly what happened, though Ziskin certainly contributed to the film’s conclusion. And while it would also be a good, dark Hollywood story if screenwriter J.F. Lawton were devastated by the way his gritty drama, originally called 3,000, was turned into the uber-rom-com Pretty Woman, that’s not what happened either. Lawton was a struggling screenwriter when he first wrote 3,000 in the late 1980s, a dark drama that drew inspiration from films like Wall Street and The Last Detail. As Lawton tells it, he was just trying to do something new to get a gig. “I was a screenwriter who was trying to get a job, I was unemployed and I was working in post-production and I was trying to sell scripts, and I had been writing all of these ninja scripts and comedies, and I just couldn’t get any attention.” So, it was time for a change. “I suddenly said, ‘Well, maybe I need to do something more serious and dramatic,’ and I had written a script called Red Sneakers which was about a one-legged lesbian standup comic who was an alcoholic, and all of a sudden, I got a lot of attention. People were really interested! People were talking to me.”
Red Sneakers, a more serious film from the mostly ninja flick–oriented Lawton, then beget 3,000, a dark fable about a financially destroyed America and the perils of showing the good life to people who had never experienced it before.
The kernel of what would become 3,000—and then Pretty Woman—isn’t necessarily obvious in the final film, but it’s there: “Wall Street had either come out or was coming out, I had heard about it and the whole issue about the financiers who were destroying companies. I kind of thought about the idea that one of these people would met somebody who was affected by what they were doing,” Lawton remembers. That he happened to be living in Hollywood at the time, in a neighborhood populated by daughters of the Rust Belt who had turned to prostitution, was just a strange coincidence.
Lawton’s original script still contains many of the classic beats and scenes that people remember from the final film, including a trip to the opera, a series of bad shopping experiences, and that fancy dinner with the kind-hearted businessman whose company he is trying to raid. The characters are mostly the same, even Vivian’s best friend Kit, while the character who would become Jason Alexander’s Stuckey is simply known as William. But the tone and ending are completely different, and it’s mostly a relief when Vivian and Edward don’t end up together, even though the story ends on a decidedly down note. 3,000 ends with Kit and Vivian on a bus bound for Disneyland—that the film would eventually be produced by Disney is yet another odd bit to a complicated story—with Kit anticipating a fun day financed by Vivian’s week with Edward, as Vivian “stares out emptily ahead.” That’s it. That’s all.
Basically, it was “dark” and “gritty” before Hollywood even knew they wanted “dark” and “gritty.”
That didn’t stop the industry from loving the script, however, original dark conclusion and all. (Still, even then, Lawton maintains, “There was always a debate about the ending.”) The film was developed at the Sundance Institute and then purchased by producers Arnon Milchan and Steven Reuther, of Vestron; when that company went belly up, the film’s rights, as Lawton puts it, were “upgraded to Disney.”
It ended up being one heck of a fortuitous upgrade, because Disney just so happened to be looking for something darker. Specifically, they were looking for something darker to keep director Garry Marshall at Disney after the success of Beaches, another film with some dark underpinnings. Was 3,000 too dark for Disney? Maybe, but they wanted it anyway.
“There was some debate at the time that they were doing too much fluff and they could only succeed with fluff, so they were very proud of Beaches and they wanted to continue that,” Lawton says. With 3,000, even darker than Beaches, they could hang on to Marshall, whom Lawton says was flirting with the idea of going to another studio. Marshall confirms that he was considering leaving the studio for other endeavors, but he was intrigued by Lawton’s script, which he considered to be well written already, and its story of “a girl who wanted to change her life, and did.”
Lawton says Marshall “insisted” that he be allowed to do two of his own rewrites before they brought someone else on, a move that Marshall attributes to his own background in screenwriting, and his belief that “the original writer’s thoughts are the most important.” But when Lawton rewrote the script with a happy ending, that didn’t satisfy everyone. “I was told by the executives that I had lightened it too much. I think they probably would have replaced me anyway, but the reason they claimed to fire me is that I lightened it too much and they were concerned,” Lawton remembers. “During this whole thing, there was all this whole debate about ‘How do we end it, how do we save her?’ without it feeling like a cop-out.”
Still, Lawton was convinced that Marshall had a vision that he wanted translated to the big screen, and Marshall concedes that he did – in his mind, it was a fairy tale, with a twist. The director recalls, “My vision was a combination of fairytales. Julia [Roberts] was Rapunzel, Richard [Gere] was Prince Charming and Hector [Elizondo] was the fairy godmother. It didn’t seem like a vision everybody would have, but I did.”
Lawton believes the studio wanted a happy ending in particular because Gere and Roberts were being courted for the lead roles. “They had auditioned Al Pacino, they had auditioned Michelle Pfeiffer, and it would definitely have been a different movie if had it been Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer,” he says. “It might have been closer to the original script and maybe not have had a happy ending. But the chemistry between Julia and Gere, it is palpable on the screen, it was palpable in auditions. You can’t really see how it could end any other way, because they just light up with each other.”
Marshall agrees, sharing of his first impressions of his eventual lead actors: “The chemistry between Roberts and Gere was perfect. The actors brought such a lovability and charm that I didn’t think the audience would want a dark ending, and it didn’t hurt that I am from the school of happy endings.”
The script then cycled through multiple other writers (including Stephen Metcalf, Robert Garland, and Barbara Benedek), but Lawton doesn’t recall being upset about the changes. “I was thrilled! That’s the other side of it, is that I’m supposed to be the wounded artist in all of this who painted the da Vinci or whatever and then they slashed it. I was a guy who was writing ninja movies and trying to get a job. If you’re an architect and you design a cabin for the woods, and somebody says, ‘We want to make it into a skyscraper’ . . . the fact that Disney came in and wanted to do it as a big-budget movie with a major director was a great thing.”
Lawton remains the only credited screenwriter on the project. If anyone deserves an additional writing credit, though, it might just be Marshall himself, who, Lawton reveals is responsible for a number of the film’s details, including Vivian’s fairy-tale speech and the polo match.
But Ziskin made her major contribution, too.
“I believe that Laura did come out with the last line—‘She saves him right back,’ ” Lawton recalls fondly. Still, he balks at the version of the story that says Ziskin was the one who wanted the happy ending. “There was a lot of discussion by a lot of people . . . I certainly didn’t write every line or every scene, it was very much a collaborative process.”
A collaborative process that Lawton, 25 years later, sees as only for the best.
“If I had written the final draft, or somebody else had written the final draft, I don’t think it ever would have gotten produced,” he offers. “I think it got produced because the original script had gone to Sundance, it was prestigious, it was viewed as serious art, so it was allowed to touch into this area of sexuality and money and prostitution and all of that. It gave Hollywood permission to do it, and then Garry was smart enough, because he’s got incredible pop instincts, to say, ‘O.K., this is what people want to see, they want to see the fairy tale.’ ”
At the end of Pretty Woman—not the end of 3,000—the character known as “Happy Man” (played by Abdul Salaam Razzac), joyfully yells to the characters, the extras, the audience itself: “Welcome to Hollywood! What's your dream? Everybody comes here; this is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don’t, but keep on dreamin’—this is Hollywood. Always time to dream, so keep on dreamin’.”
When it comes to Hollywood, there’s really only one dream: to make a movie that people love that makes buckets of money. Pretty Woman was that. And, tucked inside Pretty Woman’s sunny shell, 3,000 was, too. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 88 | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/magazine/hollywood-movies-race-diversity.html | en | Hollywood’s New Fantasy: A Magical, Colorblind Past | [
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] | 2024-03-31T00:00:00 | Films and TV shows keep reimagining history as a multiracial dream world. Is that really a step forward? | en | /vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/magazine/hollywood-movies-race-diversity.html | Not long ago, in the cinema, I found myself trying to focus on Timothée Chalamet’s charming portrayal of a young Willy Wonka, arriving penniless in a new city. What drew my attention instead was the population he encountered there. The first person to greet him was a joyful British Indian. Soon we met a cute orphan sidekick, played by a Black American actor, and the chief of police, played by a biracial American. The vaguely Mitteleuropean city Wonka had come to — Viennese shops, Italian architecture, English language — was a happy melting pot: All races seemed to coexist without race meaning anything. The story was set in a fantastical past, but its cast looked like a utopian 21st-century London, with actors of British and Caribbean and Asian backgrounds all stirred together. The Oompa-Loompas, described by Roald Dahl as a pygmy people found “in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before,” were played by Hugh Grant.
Across the arts, we now see so many worlds that never existed. David Copperfield is played by Dev Patel. Marvel’s Norse pantheon includes a Black deity. The hit Netflix series “Bridgerton” depicts a version of Regency England ruled by a Black queen and an anachronistically multiracial royal court.
When you see these examples gathered, they’re often followed by some complaint of a world gone mad with inclusion. In Britain, for instance, there was some outrage when the protagonist of an otherwise faithful Agatha Christie adaptation was revised to be a Nigerian immigrant. But the problem, for viewers, isn’t wokeness run amok; it’s the incoherence of the world we are watching. We see an African man solving crimes in a rural English village of the 1950s, as the sun sets on the empire — yet his race is barely mentioned or considered and never makes any material difference in his experience.
You might call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed.
And yet something is off, something that makes these stories impossible to get lost in. You can never fully envision the Magical Multiracial Past without having to mentally take apart the entire scaffolding of world history. “Bridgerton” is set before Britain abolished slavery, an institution that apparently exists, largely unmentioned, in the world of the show. What, precisely, are the rules of a world in which a Black queen reigns over a British Empire that sanctions the enslavement of Black people?
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5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 32 | 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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] | null | [] | null | Julia Roberts and Richard Gere star in an irresistible comedy hit. | en | https://static-assets.bamgrid.com/product/disneyplus/favicons/favicon-aurora.9c40657cf520f9cfcf49dbb4f316aa7c.ico | https://www.disneyplus.com/en-tw/movies/pretty-woman/10g9Pmepmphh | When streetwise Vivian (Julia Roberts) meets billionaire Edward (Richard Gere), their lives are worlds apart. But Vivian's energetic spirit challenges Edward's no-nonsense approach to life, and soon they are teaching each other – and falling in love!
Academy Award® winner Julia Roberts and Golden Globe winner Richard Gere light up the screen in this classic comedy hit. Vivian (Roberts) is a carefree, streetwise diamond in the rough when she meets sophisticated billionaire Edward (Gere) in a chance encounter that turns into a week-long business arrangement. But Vivian's energetic spirit challenges Edward's no-nonsense approach to life, and soon they are teaching each other – and falling in love! This timeless rags-to-riches romance captures hearts with its humor, passion and unforgettable fun. | |||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 52 | https://www.imdb.com/list/ls006736250/ | en | Best Native American Movies | [
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] | null | [] | null | My personal favorites of some of the best movies with a Native American theme. Feel free to let me know your favorites. | en | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/list/ls006736250/ | A young Lakota Sioux, adopted by a wealthy Jewish couple in Beverly Hills, gets in touch with his cultural roots and solves a mystery in this thriller. Because of his upbringing, Jesse Rainfeather Goldman knows almost nothing of Native American traditions. He is doing his internship when he suddenly receives an amulet from the Lakota reservation in Sioux City. It is from his real mother. Jesse's curiosity is piqued, and he immediately travels to his birthplace to learn why she sent it. Unfortunately, by the time he arrives, his mother's body is discovered in the smoldering wreckage of her home. She was shot before she was burned. Jesse's investigation into her death is not welcomed by the local captain of police and his assistant. He is almost beaten to death but is saved by his grandfather, a shaman, and a Lakota woman. The newly healed Jesse begins to explore his tribe's customs. He then contacts his mother's spirit and she leads him to the film's conclusion. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 11 | https://calvarychapel.com/posts/biblical-femininity-gods-unique-design-for-women/ | en | Biblical Femininity: God’s Unique Design for Women | [
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"Angie Nelson"
] | 2015-06-04T07:00:00+00:00 | What does it mean to be a woman? How can a girl know how to be a woman? We need not look far to understand the messages that the world is sending girls. “Be pretty… and seductive.” “Be important.” “Strive to achieve equality with men.” As pervasive as these messages are in our western culture,... | en | Calvary Chapel | https://calvarychapel.com/posts/biblical-femininity-gods-unique-design-for-women/ | What does it mean to be a woman? How can a girl know how to be a woman? We need not look far to understand the messages that the world is sending girls. “Be pretty… and seductive.” “Be important.” “Strive to achieve equality with men.” As pervasive as these messages are in our western culture, are these the messages we should follow in order to be the very best version of ourselves? Do these line up with God’s message to women? What is God’s view of womanhood, we ask in the midst of so many conflicting ideas.
Many women, like myself, did not grow up in a home in which their mother modeled godly Christian character. But as God’s adopted daughter, at the age of fifteen I began to learn what God designed women to be. God’s clear and wonderful Word helped me to know what womanhood looks like. God’s Word is full of examples that help us to decipher what godly femininity is, among the backdrop of our modern society’s mixed messages. By reading His Word and soaking in His Holy presence, I learned what it means to be a Christian woman. Let’s delve into the subject of biblical femininity together and find out what God has to say on the subject.
In the Bible we find that women are:
Loved by God
First and most importantly, as I study the Bible I find out that God loves women! From the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the New, God goes out of His way to demonstrate His love to all types of women. He goes to outsiders and insiders, young and old, to intentionally display His love to all women. In cultures that did not traditionally give to women the same value as men, God goes out of His way to show His love and care for women. Consider Hagar, an outcast Egyptian slave, to whom the Lord personally appears, speaks, and encourages (Genesis 16:7). And consider Sarah, to whom the Lord comes and speaks when she is 90 years old and waning in her faith (Genesis 18).
Consider Jesus in the New Testament as He goes out of His way time and again to meet with women and address their needs personally. For example, He goes out of His way to meet a Samaritan woman by a well and has a lengthy, personal conversation with her. With great patience He shares His good news with her. His disciples could not fathom why He would do such a thing (see John 4). Consider the woman caught in adultery, whom the Lord Jesus sets free to “go and sin no more” (John 8:11). Consider the woman of Canaan, whom Jesus traveled far to meet (in the region of Tyre and Sidon). He strengthened her faith and healed her daughter (Matthew 15:28). A widow in the town of Nain felt the personal touch and compassion of Jesus too, as He raised her son from the dead (Luke 7:11-17)! It would take too long to describe here all the encounters, but reading the Bible all the way through, I find that God really does love women just as much as men, and He goes out of His way to make sure that we know that! This brings me great personal assurance to know that the Creator of the universe loves me!
Designed to Beautify, Help & Nurture
We are unique. As women, we have been uniquely designed by God to fulfill a purpose that only we can fulfill. God has placed certain attributes in women that enable us to fulfill our purpose. Firstly, God has given women beauty, and a desire to beautify. When Eve was brought to Adam, he took one look at her and he was out of his mind with excitement! Finally God had given to Adam someone like him, but beautifully designed to complement and complete him. “At last!” [Adam] exclaimed. “This one is bone from my bone, and flesh from my flesh! She will be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken from ‘man.’” (Genesis 2:23 NLT). Women are continually recognized for their beauty (for example, Genesis 6:2, Genesis 12:11, Genesis 24:16, Proverbs 6:25, and Proverbs 31:30), and yet we are taught to seek the inner beauty of the heart. “Do not let your adornment be merely outward—arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on fine apparel—rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God” (1 Peter 3:3-4). So while the world around us is teaching us to focus intently on beautifying our exterior, God in His Word teaches women that true beauty is found on the inside.
Women are also uniquely designed as “helpmates” and nurturers. These truths apply to women whether or not we ever marry or have children. Genesis 2:18 says, “And the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.’” God has made women helpers. Women have a natural gifting toward helping others. We instinctually see the needs of others and desire to help. Women are also designed by God to bear children. Within that design He has given to women a wonderful ability to nurture and care for others. Women are often the first to notice the emotional and physical needs of others, and desire to care for that need.
Called to Faith and Great Purpose
Although the Scriptures teach women to be in a support role, as helpmates submitted to God’s authority in their lives, this does not in any way mean that we are weak or less than men in God’s eyes. Women throughout Scripture who walk with God are valiant and courageous for Him. Consider Deborah (Judges 4:4), Rahab (Joshua 6:25), Esther (book of Esther), Ruth (book of Ruth), and Mary the mother of Jesus as just a few examples of godly women who demonstrated great strength and courage. When we too chose to walk with God, He will do incredible things in and through our lives. According to His Word, He is “able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory” (Ephesians 3:20-21). Jesus has plans for us and through us that are greater than we could even imagine.
Made to be His Bride
Women uniquely understand what it means to be a bride! Almost every girl seems to be born with a desire to someday be a bride. Many little girls practice being a bride from the time they are very young. Girls dream and play and plan their weddings! The Bible teaches us that ultimately we are called to be God’s bride (Isaiah 62:5). While the church as a whole is called the bride of Christ (Ephesians 5:31-32, Revelations 22:17), understanding that I am ultimately called to be Christ’s bride brings good perspective and balance to me as a married woman. And although earthly marriage is designed to be a gift from God, no man on earth can fulfill every dream in a little girl’s heart. In Scripture I find that Christ is the perfect fulfillment of that dream. God’s Word has the wisdom we need in order to know how to live on this earth. He teaches women what godly character looks like, and how to be a wife (Proverbs 31, Titus 2:4-5; Ephesians 5:15-33, 1 Peter 3:1-6). Ephesians 5 describes the roles of wives and husbands, while placing everything in the greater context of marriage as a picture of Christ’s love for His bride. Our marriages are to be a reflection of the ultimate marriage. How different is this message to the message of the world around us?
God’s Great Purpose
This world’s message directs people in selfishness and a survival of the fittest mentality. The message of the world is do whatever is best for you, with no greater purpose in mind. God has a greater purpose in mind. When we cling to Him, we find that everything “works together for the good of them that love Him and are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). May we as women seek God’s greater purpose and let His Word and His power through Christ, transform our lives. As God loves us, let’s pour out His love and grace onto others.
Jesus promised, ““He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:38 NASB). As women living in this world yet alive to God, may God’s living water sustain us, supply us with His grace, and pour out to refresh others. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 13 | https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/subjects-of-desire-review-1234934325/ | en | ‘Subjects of Desire’ Review: Smart, Wide-Ranging Investigation of Black Beauty Standards | [
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] | 2021-03-21T07:01:28+00:00 | The 50th Miss Black America pageant is backdrop to a nimble, idea-packed doc that acts as an excellent primer on Blackness and the beauty ideal. | en | Variety | https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/subjects-of-desire-review-1234934325/ | Both critical and celebratory, Jennifer Holness‘ packed and penetrating documentary “Subjects of Desire” provides a superb overview of how Black culture has influenced, and been influenced by, contemporary beauty ideals from Civil War times to #BlackGirlMagic and beyond. Solidly if modestly presented — occasionally the photo-montage-and-voiceover sections feel a little bit PowerPointy — this energetic and provocative film lives easily on the small screen, though a truly enterprising outlet or streaming service would take note of how many fascinating avenues Holness’ dexterous arguments open up and order it to series.
The film is loosely structured around the 50th anniversary of the Miss Black America Pageant, but “loosely” should be stressed: Where a pageant’s suspense-based structure and inbuilt spectacle might prove too tantalizing a draw for most filmmakers, Holness has bigger fish to fry than backstage drama, wardrobe malfunctions and spangly tiaras. Instead, she uses the pageant’s history to get straight into the fraught backstory of Black beauty standards in relation to white society.
The first Miss Black America was held in protest against the traditional exclusion of Black women from the Miss America pageant, which was happening right across the street, and was itself being protested by (white) feminists for its perceived objectification of women. As author and academic Dr. Cheryl Thompson remarks, already in 1968, these contradictory protest events placed the progressive agendas of Black and white women “on opposite sides of the beauty paradigm.”
Popular on Variety
Skipping from archive footage to informative montage to film clip to talking head, Holness then embarks on a whistle-stop tour through the evolution, often the revolution, of that paradigm. Hair is a great case in point: in the Reconstruction era, Black women took to straightening their hair, a grooming technique not available to slaves, to signal their free status. Later, the civil rights movement somewhat reversed that association — Malcolm X’s “Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair?” speech reverberates here. And over the past 50 years or so, issues of appropriation, especially around braids and dreadlocks; the policing of Black women’s employment and social opportunities based on their hairstyles; and the tangle of class- and labor-related struggles that infuse tonsorial choices with deeper significance, have ensured that the aesthetics of hair remain a remarkably active political battlefront in the beauty wars.
Holness also teases out the development of the three traditional stereotypes of Black womanhood — the mammy, the Jezebel and the sapphire (aka the angry black woman) — and how perniciously they persist even in our supposedly more enlightened times. All the while, she cuts back and forth between point-making pre-existing footage and warmly shot interview segments with a varied but uniformly engaged and illuminating lineup of interviewees. They include singers India Arie and Jully Black, several writers and academics, former Miss Black America winner Brittany Lewis and three of the year’s hopeful contestants. Oh, and yes, Rachael Dolezal.
Not going to lie, when Dolezal first appears, it’s a shock. Infamously a white woman who rose to prominence claiming to be Black (and even now still “identifies culturally” as Black) her inclusion briefly threatens to derail Holness’ film. Dolezal is such a specifically peculiar outlier, not to mention such a pariah among both Black and white communities, that it feels like you either make your entire movie about her or you ignore her altogether. But on another level, her appearance here, though it can only scratch the surface of the many supplemental issues her story raises, is emblematic of the open-mindedness of Holness’ approach. Though her film is an invigorating opportunity to showcase Black women negotiating their own terms of engagement with the beauty ideal, it is also admirably unafraid to touch on more controversial areas. Colorism, light-skin privilege and the attitudes of Black men toward Black women’s looks are also investigated, acknowledging divisions and hierarchies that exist within the Black community too.
On the one hand, this is an astonishing amount of ground for one 103-minute film to cover. On the other, it’s inevitable that some of the issues raised are not as fully explored as others. The ethics of beauty pageants, for example, are not much examined. And the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on the imagery and aesthetics of resistance, which is suggested by the frequent use of the iconic 2016 picture of the Black woman protester facing down a phalanx of cops in riot gear, is never thoroughly scrutinized. It’s a notable omission in an otherwise fantastically full film that is a convincing corrective to the idea that discussions about beauty are trivial. On the contrary, “Subjects of Desire” reveals how politically important such discussion is, especially when it gives voice to the very women who must move through this world with those social constructs inextricably encoded in skin and sexuality, in history, and in hair. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 0 | https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000754199/ | en | Chick Flicks: 100 Movies All Girls Must Watch!!!!!!!!!! | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000754199/ | Cady Heron is a hit with The Plastics, the A-list girl clique at her new school, until she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George.
Loretta Castorini, a bookkeeper from Brooklyn, New York, finds herself in a difficult situation when she falls for the brother of the man she has agreed to marry.
A poor girl must choose between the affections of dating her childhood sweetheart or a rich but sensitive playboy.
A successful veternarian & radio show host with low self-esteem asks her model friend to impersonate her when a handsome man wants to see her.
Two dim-witted, inseparable friends hit the road for their ten-year high school reunion and concoct an elaborate lie about their lives in order to impress their classmates.
A young New York socialite becomes interested in a young man who has moved into her apartment building, but her past threatens to get in the way.
Shallow, rich and socially successful Cher is at the top of her Beverly Hills high school's pecking scale. Seeing herself as a matchmaker, Cher first coaxes two teachers into dating each other.
Mia Thermopolis has just found out that she is the heir apparent to the throne of Genovia. With her friends Lilly and Michael Moscovitz in tow, she tries to navigate through the rest of her sixteenth year.
Elle Woods, a fashionable sorority queen, is dumped by her boyfriend. She decides to follow him to law school. While she is there, she figures out that there is more to her than just looks.
Benjamin Barry is an advertising executive and ladies' man who, to win a big campaign, bets that he can make a woman fall in love with him in 10 days.
Self-esteem and insecurity are at the heart of this comedy about the relationship between a mother and her three confused daughters.
The story centers on a 14-year-old girl who keeps a diary about the ups and downs of being a teenager, including the things she learns about kissing.
An attractive and popular teenager, who is mean-spirited toward others, finds herself in the body of an older man, and must find a way to get back to her original body.
A high-school boy, Cameron, cannot date Bianca until her anti-social older sister, Kat, has a boyfriend. So, Cameron pays a mysterious boy, Patrick, to charm Kat.
Bridget Jones is determined to improve herself while she looks for love in a year in which she keeps a personal diary.
After finding love, Bridget Jones questions if she really has everything she'd ever dreamed of having.
Strait-laced Rose breaks off relations with her party girl sister, Maggie, over an indiscretion involving Rose's boyfriend. The chilly atmosphere is broken with the arrival of Ella, the grandmother neither sister knew existed.
Unpopular schoolgirl Jenna Rink makes an unusual wish on her birthday. Miraculously, her wish comes true and the 13-year-old Jenna wakes up the next day as a 30-year-old woman.
An artist gets a job at a beachside sandwich shop, where she hangs out with a techie, a flirt, a rocker, a hippie, and a Wiccan.
Seven junior-high-school girls organize a daycare camp for children while at the same time experiencing classic adolescent growing pains.
Two vicious step-siblings of an elite Manhattan prep school make a wager: to deflower the new headmaster's daughter before the start of term.
Pleasantly plump teenager Tracy Turnblad teaches 1962 Baltimore a thing or two about integration after landing a spot on a local TV dance show. | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 31 | http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-pretty-and-beautiful/ | en | Difference Between Pretty and Beautiful | [
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] | 2018-10-06T18:00:26-05:00 | Difference Between Pretty and Beautiful More than often, people interchange the uses of pretty and beautiful. Many a time are when people, in different contexts would not know that the two words have differences. In the end, they end up calling a pretty lady beautiful and a beautiful idea pretty without much of a thought about the variances. As a | en | https://3ba1f5b2.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/themes/mimbo/images/favicon.ico | Difference Between | http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-pretty-and-beautiful/ | More than often, people interchange the uses of pretty and beautiful. Many a time are when people, in different contexts would not know that the two words have differences. In the end, they end up calling a pretty lady beautiful and a beautiful idea pretty without much of a thought about the variances.
As a game changer, you should realize there is a big difference between the two. They might be used in the same way, to describe a person, item, or idea but with a deeper analysis, they will be saying something dissimilar all the same. They will all be meaning that something is looking good on varied parameters.
Definition of Pretty
Pretty can take different definitions depending on the subject. When talking of an attractive individual, in most cases a woman or a child, it is said that she is pretty. The adjective, in this case, refers to the person as an attractive one in a delicate way but without being truly beautiful. It could also mean good-looking, appealing, lovely, or nice-looking. However pretty can have other meanings depending on the usage and the variance should be brought out well if the meaning needs to be retained.
Pretty may be used to refer to the quality of being pleasing. This is so especially when referring to physical attractiveness and when considering one’s physical features.
Possible Application of Pretty
If a man would say a woman is pretty, then he will have actually developed a deeper liking for her. This would be different from when he says she is fit, fine, or hot which would mean he is not looking for anything much than just talking or a short time fling. In the former case, if the man would describe a lady as pretty, she should rejoice as he is considering her for keeps.
Definition of Beautiful
Being beautiful is being more than pretty. Online and physical dictionaries carry the definition of beautiful as pleasing not to the eyes but the mind and senses aesthetically. A great example would be to say a poem is beautiful, meaning it pleases the listener of the narration or the reader. It would, therefore, not be the pleasure derived from the structure of the poem or how the artistic considerations have been observed. Rather, it would be purely based on the message.
What Can Be Described as Beautiful
In most cases, beautiful is used to describe a woman. When that is the case, it means the woman has a friendly nature, regardless of whether they are pretty on the outside or not. When that woman’s brain is to go by, she has a smart one. By combining the power of her brain and other qualities, she enchants everyone.
A beautiful woman has a nurturing nature. They will most of the times present joy, love, care, passion, and generosity. These are traits that everyone would want around them, and they make the woman beautiful.
A beautiful woman commands confidence too. Their accomplishments are way better too. With skills that a pretty woman might not possess, you can never draw a similarity between the two.
Difference Between Pretty and Beautiful
Being pretty means your outward appearance appeals to people. Beautiful on the other side comes from within. As such, you could be pretty and attract people all the time, but the moment they start acquainting with you, they flee. This only means you do not have a beautiful personality.
Being beautiful means being unique while being pretty is more general.
A beautiful individual has it easy forming relationships with friends, families, and partners and maintaining it. A pretty person, no matter how they might want to fake it, the friendship will break it.
Pretty vs. Beautiful: Comparison Table
Summary of Pretty Vs. Beautiful
In the long run, pretty and beautiful might be interchanged, but that will be disregarding the rule of grammar. Prettiness, on the one hand, comes from the outside while beautiful on the other comes from the inside. It would, therefore, not be strange to hear someone describe their evil granny as pretty but not beautiful. She might also be not so pretty, but her actions and great deeds qualify her to be called beautiful.
Sharing is caring! | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 28 | https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1217797768/poor-things-review-emma-stone | en | Unhinged yet uplifting, 'Poor Things' is an un-family-friendly 'Barbie' | [
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] | 2023-12-08T00:00:00 | Emma Stone stars as an adult woman with the anarchic spirit of a very young child in a strangely touching film that's filled with transgressive sex, sadistic power games and grisly violence. | en | NPR | https://www.npr.org/2023/12/08/1217797768/poor-things-review-emma-stone | Poor Things is a little Alice in Wonderland, a little Wizard of Oz, a little Marquis de Sade and a whole lot of Frankenstein. It also has a lot in common with some of Yorgos Lanthimos' earlier films, like The Favourite and Dogtooth: transgressive sex, sadistic power games and grisly violence.
But if the movie is brutal, it's also extravagantly beautiful, extremely funny and, by the end, strangely touching, even uplifting. This may be Lanthimos' most unhinged movie, but it also has a joyous exuberance that I haven't felt in much of his earlier work.
The story, loosely adapted from a 1992 novel by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, follows a most unusual character named Bella Baxter, played by a mesmerizing Emma Stone. When we first meet Bella in 19th-century London, she looks like an adult woman but has the awkward gait, unformed speech and anarchic spirit of a very young child.
As we learn early on, she's the product of a back-from-the-dead mad science experiment, in which she was implanted with the brain of the child she was carrying at the time of her death. Bella, in other words, is both her mother and her daughter — and, in a weird way, neither.
Under the watchful eye of her creator — that's Willem Dafoe as the sweetly deranged scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter — Bella develops rapidly. Before long, she's walking and talking more or less like a grown-up, though her inventively tortured speech patterns remain one of the best running gags in Tony McNamara's script.
Inevitably, Bella discovers sex, first exploring her own adult body with childlike curiosity, and then having a passionate fling with a rogue named Duncan Wedderburn — a hilariously over-the-top Mark Ruffalo. When they have sex for the first time, the movie, which until now has mostly been filmed in black-and-white, explodes into wild, rapturous color.
Like an especially bawdy riff on Voltaire's Candide, Poor Things becomes the story of Bella's sexual odyssey. Ever since the movie's Venice Film Festival premiere, much of the reaction has focused on its many frenzied sex scenes, in which the bodies of Stone and Ruffalo, among others, are on abundant display. But the movie is after something more than mere titillation; much of the time, it emphasizes the absurdity rather than the ecstasy of sex.
Before long, Bella grows bored — and disillusioned. She learns that men are mostly horrible, and that the world is full of suffering and poverty. Soon, she begins making new friends, reading Emerson and nourishing her mind. At one point, while they're on a European boat cruise, Duncan becomes jealous, accusing Bella of spending too much time with two other travelers, who are having an engrossing intellectual debate. Bella responds, as she often does, by referring to herself in the third person: "These two are fighting and ideas are banging around in Bella's head and heart like lights in a storm."
If Bella's baroque dialogue makes Poor Things a lot of fun to listen to, the film is also gorgeous to look at. Lanthimos has never been afraid of anachronism, and here he embraces it head-on. His production designers, Shona Heath and James Price, have dreamed up a futuristic, candy-colored vision of the 19th century, where people movers soar over city streets and chimneys belch green smoke into a dark purple sky.
This almost Steampunk fantasy version of Victoriana, often shot with fish-eye lenses by the gifted cinematographer Robbie Ryan, suggests just how radically strange the world must look to Bella's eyes. And Jerskin Fendrix's dissonant, unruly score feels like something piped in directly from Bella's subconscious.
Some admirers of Poor Things have argued that it's a feminist work, in which Bella's erotic awakening becomes the key to her liberation. The movie's detractors have dismissed it as just a superficially empowering girlboss narrative. I'm hardly the only one to have noticed that it's basically the un-family-friendly version of Barbie, in which a woman's childlike naiveté becomes a surprisingly effective weapon against the patriarchy. I guess that makes Ruffalo's greasy-haired Duncan a Ken, though you might say the same for the men played by Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael and Christopher Abbott, all of whom try, in their own ways, to manipulate Bella's destiny.
But Bella won't be controlled, and she's much too brilliant a character to be reduced to a symbol or archetype. Stone gives a great, audacious performance; her Bella can be ignorant, selfish, impulsive and cruel, but also fiercely intelligent, witty, thoughtful and kind. Lanthimos has seldom expressed much affection for his characters, but he clearly loves this one to pieces. He's made a movie that, even at its most outlandish, has its heart in the right place, even if its brains are not. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 92 | 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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] | 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 | 1 | 90 | https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/us-movie-ending-explained/ | en | Us Movie Ending Explained: Symbolism, Themes & Easter Eggs | [
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] | 2020-10-25T14:35:12+00:00 | Us Movie Ending Explained: Symbolism, Themes & Easter Eggs · Directing · StudioBinder | en | https://s.studiobinder.com/wp-content/uploads/favicon.ico | StudioBinder | https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/us-movie-ending-explained/ | THE ENDING OF US EXPLAINED
Can you explain the ending of Us?
The Us film follows Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), a wife and mother to two children who is haunted by an event in her childhood where she found a doppelganger of herself inside a House of Mirrors. As an adult, she travels with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and son Jason (Evan Alex) to their family’s summer home. On the first night, they find four individuals standing in their driveway. The outsiders eventually make their way into the house, revealing themselves to be the family’s doppelgangers.
They refer to themselves as the Tethered. They’ve spent years living under society’s surface and have risen to “untether” themselves from their hosts. Plenty of spooky moments (as well as some pretty hilarious events) occur until we get the big reveal at the end.
The woman we know as Adelaide was actually tethered. She swapped places with the real Adelaide all those years ago.
Us Movie Ending Explained • The Final Scene
Adelaide was really Red all along. She shares a glance with her son with him seemingly understanding who his mother actually is. After all, he saw the brutal, tether-like behavior she displayed underground. But he doesn’t say anything. He just puts his mask on… just like his mother has worn a mask for all these years.
We pull back and see tethered have fulfilled their goal of creating their own “Hands Across America.” But as is the case with any good twist ending, there were clues hidden all throughout the film.
For starters, Red is the only tethered who can speak albeit in a raspy, damaged voice. This is due to the fact she’s the original Adelaide who was born and raised in normal society.
Lupita Nyong’o’s Voice in Us • Variety
Next, you have the flashback scene with Adelaide’s parents speaking with a doctor. They’re concerned because their daughter isn’t speaking anymore. Initially, you assume this is simply due to the trauma she experienced. But with the twist, we realize it’s due to the fact she’s the doppelganger and didn’t know how to speak.
This is again hinted at during the beach scene when the Wilsons are with the Tylers. Adelaide explains to Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) that she’s not much of a talker. Again, the audience assumes this is due to deep-seated trauma, but it’s due to her real nature.
The twist was hiding in plain sight all along. And it plays a crucial role in the central themes of the film.
US MOVIE MEANING
What’s the ultimate Us meaning?
There are plenty of common movie themes that come up frequently, including ones about society at large. That’s where Us 2019 focuses its interest.
The film sets up a society of haves and have-nots. You have two groups of people who are identical in every way, but while one caste gets to enjoy their lives and have agency, the other caste is doomed to wander in tunnels.
There are many ways to interpret this. It serves as commentary between rich vs. poor or whites vs. minorities. Director/writer Jordan Peele has remained tight-lipped about any single Us movie explanation, and that’s part of the fun of reading into the film.
Jordan Peele Explains Us • Collider
While there are many metaphors to make of this film, it ultimately comes down to who has privilege and who doesn’t. We don’t actually have shadow versions of ourselves wandering around tunnels (or do we… no, we don’t). However, there is someone out there who could have had your life had the circumstances been different.
You may have had opportunities inaccessible to others because your parents are middle-class, because you’re white, or because you’re a man. And the actions the wealthy take don’t just exist in a vacuum. In Us, we see how the tethered recreate actions taken by their counterparts. If people are on a rollercoaster, then the tethered wraith around as though they’re on a ride, too. The actions of those with power impact others even if they’ll never know.
This idea of who has power comes full form with the Adelaide revelation.
THE MOVIE US EXPLAINED
How does Adelaide fall into this theme?
We discover that Adelaide was born a tethered, only to eventually escape and switch places with the real Adelaide. We only learn this in the final few moments of the film, and in the script, the swap is even sadder than what was in the finished film.
Adelaide, the real Adelaide, had her life taken away from her. Even though Red took her spot, she doesn’t seem to have missed a beat. She’s actually done quite well for herself in life.
She was able to become socialized enough to land a husband, who went to Howard University nonetheless. She has two kids. They’re able to take a vacation at a beachfront home and ride around in a boat. Adelaide’s a little quiet, but there’s nothing wrong with that. At first glance, you wouldn’t assume anything is amiss about this all-American family.
And therein lies the true tragedy of the film. There are living, breathing human beings in those tunnels, grunting and lacking any agency. But Adelaide shows us it doesn’t have to be that way. The tethered could also learn how to talk and break free of their connections to their doppelgangers.
Those in power like to think they’re unique. They may want to think they got into a good university due to their own merits. They got a good job because they’re just naturally more skilled than other people. But as Us shows the audience, there’s really not much separating those in power to those without power on a base level.
Chances are, there’s a person living in poverty who could have been the CEO of a company had they been born in better circumstances. Had that person been born to wealthy parents, they could have accomplished a lot more in life. They would have had access to a better education and had the connections necessary to work up the corporate ladder.
Us Story Explained • Us and the American Dream
Us makes a strong case for nurture over nature. Adelaide’s doppelganger was able to acclimate to normal society even after entering it well into childhood. Similarly, the real Adelaide has transformed into a murderous fiend who leads a tethered uprising. We can surmise the reason she led the revolt was because she was aware of what life was stolen from her.
Disparities in wealth and access to resources is what led to the French Revolution as well as many of the protests we see crop up in modern American society. When the disenfranchised see what life they could have, it’s only natural they get angry.
HOW DOES THE MOVIE US END?
Who’s behind creating the tethered?
In an exposition dump, Red tells us the tethered were created as a government experiment to control their counterparts on the surface. However, the experiment was later abandoned. Now, the doppelgangers merely roam around an intricate set of underground tunnels, copying the actions of their counterparts.
But this opens up a lot of questions. What happens when someone on the surface flies on a plane? Why exactly would the government use clones to control people? Why control people in the first place? Why didn’t the real Adelaide just run up to the surface once she got out of her handcuffs?
These may seem like plot holes, but in actuality, none of them really matter. The film is basically one big allegory for different classes in society. You could spend all day picking apart the logistics of creating the clones, but ultimately, they exist to horrifically highlight what American society does to those who don’t have the resources to excel.
They’re forgotten about. They’re left in the trenches until they finally realize the power of violent revolution.
CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN THE MOVIE US?
What’s the deal with Hands Across America?
In order to adequately explain the ending of Us, we need to go back to the beginning. The opening scene shows us a commercial for a charity stunt called Hands Across America. We see this idea pop up throughout the film as the tethered begin holding hands in Santa Cruz and eventually (what seems like) the entire country.
For those of you who didn’t grow up in the 1980s, Hands Across America was a charity event where people would hold hands… across America. It was supposed to raise money and awareness for homelessness and hunger, but ultimately, the stunt failed to really do anything to address those prevalent issues.
The Failed Event That Inspired Us • Galaxy Brain
The goal of Hands Across America was to address some of the issues impacting the underserved in American society. And it didn’t amount to anything more than a cheap stunt. In Us, the original Adelaide looks toward the event with its original intention. She believes such a stunt could really help the tethered find a place in society and not be confined to the tunnels any longer. The opening shot of the film perfectly foreshadows the movie’s ending, and they serve as complements to one another.
US AND JORDAN PEELE EXPLAINED
What other symbolism is found in Us?
The great aspect of Us is that it’s a film that rewards rewatches. Once you know the twist and overarching themes, you can really pay attention to the little details that support ideas raised or are just fun little Easter eggs. Here are some of the finer details to look out for as you rewatch one of the best films of 2019.
The idea of doubles
The entire plot of Us centers around doppelgangers, but doubles come up in more ways than just that. The Tylers have twin daughters. In an early scene with Adelaide at the boardwalk, we see a guy wearing a Black Flag t-shirt. In the present, we see one of the twins wearing a similar Black Flag shirt.
Additionally, there’s a man in a flashback scene with a sign reading “Jeremiah 11:11.” In the future, we get a cut to a clock where the current time reads “11:11.” In regards to the Bible verse in question, it reads:
Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.
The Itsy Bitsy Spider
During the flashback sequence, Adelaide whistles the tune of “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to herself. Think about the lyrics to that song for a minute. It’s about a spider that “climbed up the water spout,” similar to how Red climbed up through the tunnels.
But “out came the rain and washed the spider out.” Adelaide is the rain, coming to stomp out Red and prevent her from ruining the life she’s made for herself.
VHS Tapes
In the opening scene, while the commercial for Hands Across America plays, we see several VHS tapes on the shelves. These are just random movies either. They’re all related to Us in some way.
First, we have C.H.U.D., which is about a group of monsters that live in the sewers, not unlike the tethered living underground. The Goonies also deals with traveling underground, hinting at the true nature of the tethered.
The Man With Two Brains is a comedy about a man who falls in love with a woman’s brain. The idea of being connected to someone else’s being is the entire idea behind the tethered, who are linked with those on the surface. There’s also The Right Stuff, a movie about the space race. It’s a subversive choice and no doubt there’s some commentary about how America invested millions of dollars into reaching the moon rather than helping those less fortunate.
Us has a lot on its mind. And it will remain ideal Halloween viewing for horror fans who want something meatier to chew on than your standard monster flick.
UP NEXT
Foreshadowing Examples
The Us film does an excellent job of setting up its themes, iconography, and twist ending. It accomplishes this through foreshadowing, but it’s not the only film to utilize this technique. Plenty of other movies use foreshadowing as a way to clue the audience in. Plus, you can go back to watch the film to see what subtle details you missed the first time around.
Up Next: Foreshadowing Examples → | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 89 | https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-susan-sontag-wanted-for-women | en | What Susan Sontag Wanted for Women | [
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] | 2023-05-23T06:00:00-04:00 | Merve Emre writes about the feminist writing of Susan Sontag, in an extract from the introduction to “On Women,” a new collection of Sontag’s work. | en | https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico | The New Yorker | https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-susan-sontag-wanted-for-women | A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she find the ideas expressed in them relics of a distant, less enlightened past. But the essays and interviews in “On Women,” a new collection of Susan Sontag’s work, are incapable of aging badly. Though the pieces are around fifty years old, the effect of reading them today is to marvel at the untimeliness of their genius. They contain no ready-made ideas, no borrowed rhetoric—nothing that risks hardening into dogma or cant. They offer us only the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas, and the world.
The singular glamour of Susan Sontag has done her some injustice, particularly where matters of sex and gender are concerned. Suspicious of her celebrity, and convinced that her success had rendered her immune to the plights of ordinary women, her critics have characterized her relationship to the second sex as inconstant at best and faithless at worst. Consider the poet Adrienne Rich’s letter to The New York Review of Books, objecting to Sontag’s 1975 essay on Leni Riefenstahl, “Fascinating Fascism.” Dismissing Sontag’s suggestion that feminists bore some responsibility for turning Riefenstahl’s films into cultural monuments, Rich noted the “running criticism by radical feminists of male-identified ‘successful’ women, whether they are artists, executives, psychiatrists, Marxists, politicians, or scholars.” It was no accident, Rich implied, that “male-identified” values were embodied not just by Riefenstahl but by Sontag. The phenomena that Sontag was drawn to in her writing—the metamorphosis of people into objects, the obliteration of personality by style, the pursuit of perfection through domination and submission—were painted with the same broad brush of patriarchy, indicting the critic attracted to them.
It’s true that Sontag didn’t quite ally herself with the radical-feminist movement. In her journal, she questioned its “inherited political rhetoric (that of gauchisme)” and its dismissal of the intellect as “bourgeois, phallo-centric, repressive.” “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded,” she wrote in her response to Rich. Yet, unless we consent to a moralizing litmus test of what it means to be a feminist, we should remain skeptical of the idea that, as Rich put it, Sontag’s writings on women were “an intellectual exercise” more than “the expression of a felt reality.” In a journal entry from 1972, Sontag noted that “women” was one of the three themes she had been studying all her life. (The other two were “China” and “freaks.”) And it was in the seventies that the subject moved to the heart of her writing.
The historical explanation is straightforward enough. The years from 1968 to 1973 were the most publicly visible stretch of the women’s movement in the United States, years that appear to us now in an energetic sequence of film dissolves: women burning bras; women marching in the streets and swaying at candlelight vigils; women distributing mimeographed sheets with topics for consciousness-raising, including equal pay, domestic violence, housework, child care, and the right to an abortion; women thumbing through copies of “The Second Sex,” “The Feminine Mystique,” and “Sexual Politics.” Nearly every notable woman essayist opined on the movement, often by assuming a tone of cool, disdainful skepticism toward its goals and principles. Today, one reads essays like Elizabeth Hardwick’s curiously scattered “Women Re Women” or Joan Didion’s startlingly shallow “The Women’s Movement” with a vague sense of unease—or, quite simply, bafflement at their authors’ lack of fellow-feeling, their lack of interest in the conditions that touched their lives as profoundly as the lives of the women whom they condescended to so freely.
In contrast, Sontag’s essays and interviews are forceful, sympathetic, exceedingly truthful, and capacious in their imagination of what a woman is or could be. In a different world, “On Women” would have been the collection that appeared between “Styles of Radical Will” (1969) and “Under the Sign of Saturn” (1980). The work gathered here represents an overlooked half decade of Sontag’s writing, much of it undertaken between her trip to Vietnam, in 1968, and her first cancer diagnosis, in 1975. Reading the book, one realizes that its pieces are bracketed by death—that Sontag’s entire notion of women was death-ridden, haunted by an awareness of mortality. “Thinking about my own death the other day, as I often do, I made a discovery,” she wrote in her journal, in 1974. “I realized that my way of thinking has up to now been both too abstract and too concrete. Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me. For there was a middle term, both abstract and concrete: women. I am a woman. And thereby, a whole new universe of death rose before my eyes.” The spectre of death spurred her to reconsider the relationship between the individual and the collective, between the lone woman and women as a historical category. And she did so in a style that was more restrained than the flamboyant, belligerent beauty of her earlier essays, as if to speak of women as a whole required her, in part, to efface her exceptional self.
In Sontag’s essays, death assumes strange guises. Only rarely does it appear in the gruesome forms of rape and murder and slavery, as she imagined in her journal. (A tantalizing entry contains notes for an essay, never written, that she wanted to call “On Women Dying” or “How Women Die.”) Sometimes, as in “The Third World of Women,” her extraordinary 1972 interview with the leftist quarterly Libre, death was the will to self-annihilation of the entire global order, whose ideology of unlimited growth went hand in hand with “ever-increasing levels of productivity and consumption; the unlimited cannibalization of the environment.” Women and men alike were ensnared by this desire to accumulate—but women were additionally oppressed by the institution of the nuclear family, “a prison of sexual repression, a playing field of inconsistent moral laxity, a museum of possessiveness, a guilt-producing factory, and a school of selfishness.” The fact that the family was also the source of apparently unalienated values (“warmth, trust, dialogue, uncompetitiveness, loyalty, spontaneity, sexual pleasure, fun”) only increased its power.
In articulating this double diagnosis, Sontag was careful to distance herself from the rhetoric of the socialist and Marxist feminists of the era; there is, throughout the interview, a noticeable allergy to political radicalism, and a deep conviction that work may be a source of pride, affirmation, and distinction. Yet she also understood, just as those feminists did, that the integrity of the family depended on the exploitation of women’s unwaged, domestic labor. “Women who have gained the freedom to go out into ‘the world’ but still have the responsibility for marketing, cooking, cleaning, and the children when they return from work have simply doubled their labor,” she insisted. Liberation from death into life required a revolution that would overthrow the authoritarian moral habits that kept the division of labor—men at work, women in the home—intact.
Most often, however, death appears in these essays as the slow erosion of one’s sense of self, the painful contraction of life’s possibilities. Sontag described it with terrible clarity in “The Double Standard of Aging”: “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a social pathology—intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men.” Day by day, the horizon of one’s potential dimmed and receded. The body began to bear the signs of its diminishment, exposed as a traitor to the vision of the firm, unlined self that was forged in youth. Yet the vision was itself traitorous to women. “Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement,” Sontag wrote. “Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.” Women were not permitted to change, were not allowed to cast off their smooth innocence and docility in favor of wisdom, competence, strength, and ambition. The essays in “On Women” make clear that, for Sontag, the oppression of women presented an aesthetic and narrative problem as well as a political and economic one.
Does beauty pose a problem for feminism? Perhaps the better question is: Does beauty pose a problem for how women imagine their futures? What would it mean to be liberated from beauty’s conventional images, its stock stories? It is always a little embarrassing for a beautiful woman to write about physical beauty, for she must serve as both the subject and the object of her judgments. But it is just as embarrassing, if not more, for her to admit that her beauty has started to fade: for her beauty to define her now not by its startling presence but by its absence. Sontag was thirty-nine, on the cusp of forty, when she wrote “The Double Standard of Aging”—one of the only personal details she reveals throughout “On Women.” She was in her early forties when she wrote the two short essays on beauty, “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?” and “Beauty: How Will It Change Next?” “To be sure, beauty is a form of power. And deservedly so,” she wrote. Yet it was a power that had always been conceived in relation to men: “not the power to do but the power to attract.” In this sense, it was a power that negated itself. It could not be “chosen freely,” nor could it be “renounced without social censure.”
In her quest to place women in a fresher and more empowered relation to beauty, Sontag was aided by her long-standing suspicion of beauty writ large, as a judgment of people, art, and experience. It was a suspicion she first aired formally in “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in which she implied that the alliance brokered between beauty and mass civilization had authorized a certain predictability of taste. In “On Women,” that alliance secured the oppression of women by holding them to standards of self-presentation that are at once too flexible, too quick to essentialize the whims of the market and its aesthetic values, and too rigid, incapable of bestowing recognition upon those who were old, loud, ugly, unfeminine, disabled. If, as Sontag argued, beauty had been “abridged in order to prop up the mythology of the ‘feminine,’ ” then a more shocking and forgiving definition of beauty required unsexing it, violently. Beauty would no longer be subject to the approval of men; it would appropriate the masculine to do women’s bidding for them.
Camp is the hidden nerve running through the essays in “On Women.” Initially conceived of by Sontag as apolitical, it emerges here as the privileged sensibility of a politics of feminist liberation. If camp meant going against the grain of one’s sex by engaging in a “robust, shrill, vulgar parody” of gender, as she described it in her interview with Salmagundi, then there is something fantastically campy in her imagination of the politics of consciousness-raising. She encouraged women to think of themselves as actors in a “guerrilla theater,” in which they would perform the following acts in the most exaggerated and contemptuous manner possible:
They should whistle at men in the streets, raid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizeable numbers to militant lesbianism, operate their own free psychiatric and abortion clinics, provide feminist divorce counseling, establish makeup withdrawal centers, adopt their mothers’ family names as their last names, deface billboard advertising that insults women, disrupt public events by singing in honor of the docile wives of male celebrities and politicians, collect pledges to renounce alimony and giggling, bring lawsuits for defamation against the mass-circulation “women’s magazines,” conduct telephone harassment campaigns against male psychiatrists who have sexual relations with their women patients, organize beauty contests for men, put up feminist candidates for all public offices.
“Women will be much more effective politically if they are rude, shrill, and—by sexist standards—‘unattractive,’ ” Sontag proposed. “They will be met with ridicule, which they should do more than bear stoically. They should, indeed, welcome it.” Welcoming it helped neutralize the sexist condemnation of men. But it was also the first step toward eradicating the ideological division of men and women along lines of sex—for Sontag, the ultimate end of feminist revolution. “A society in which women are subjectively and objectively the genuine equals of men . . . will necessarily be an androgynous society,” she wrote. She did not value separatism, the aggressive policing of the boundaries of who was or was not a woman. She valued the right to plural forms of being, the right to her many fractured selves. She envisioned an aesthetic and political integration that would, in the final analysis, result in the obliteration of “men” and “women” as categories of identity. Then there would be no need for women to establish a private culture, no need for them to seek rooms of their own. “It’s just that they should be seeking to abolish,” she concluded.
It is the interviews that stand out as the secret treasures of “On Women,” for it is the interviews that make the most space for a plurality of style and thought that mirrored Sontag’s belief in the plurality of the self. “To be an intellectual is to be attached to the inherent value of plurality, and to the right of critical space (space for critical opposition within society),” she wrote in her journal. In the interviews, one finds a voice that is rigorous still, but bolder and freer and more gladiatorial in its pronouncements. We hear, once more, the eager combativeness of her earlier essays. We hear, too, her willingness to respond, challenge, qualify, speculate; her refusal of easy answers or offended pieties. We feel the hunger that drove her to keep thinking. And we feel, across the great and growing distance of time, the force of her demand that we never stop thinking alongside her. ♦ | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 86 | https://www.ecgprod.com/coco-vs-book-of-life/ | en | Coco vs The Book of Life | [
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] | 2018-03-02T11:16:23-05:00 | Where do you stand on the debate between Coco and The Book of Life, and do you have to pick side when two similar movies come out? We kind of did. | en | Entertainment Creative Group | https://www.ecgprod.com/coco-vs-book-of-life/ | It’s Oscar season, and as an animator, Pixar’s Coco is almost a shoe-in to be the Best Animated Film (although the looming shadow of Boss Baby might just steal…lololol).
However, as an avid fan of all things animated, I was very happy with this movie when it came out in 2014 as The Book of Life, produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Jorge Gutierrez. Ok, so not really, these aren’t actually the same movie. But the similarities have made a lot of people wonder.
The Book of Life was a good and quirky film. Plus: it was great to see an animated film with an Hispanic director and producer get a big budget and a major studio behind it. It became an underground hit, even though it wasn’t a box office slam. In fact, it’s theatrical gross just barely covered the cost to make it in the US. In the end, it became more of a home video hit. So much so that when Pixar announced they were making a “Day of the Dead” movie, everyone instantly started to make comparisons.
If you look online for movie reviews for Pixar’s Coco, they are overwhelmingly positive. However, the majority of the negative reviews draw parallels to The Book of Life. These reviews chastise Pixar, suggesting they had no business producing a similarly-themed film 3 years later. These are lazy reviews. And those critics clearly haven’t watched The Book of Life recently. Well, I happen to own a copy and decided to watch it and compare for myself.
Before we begin…
The Book of Life had a budget of around $50 million, while Coco has one upwards of $200 million. It’s not fair for me to compare these films directly considering the studios, the budgets, and the 3 year time difference. So instead, I’ll eschew technical comparisons for ones considering the writing, the music, the visuals, and the characters. If compared them directly, there’s really no contest. Coco is the clear winner when it comes to the quality of the visuals from the lighting to the textures to the rendering. Moreover, I’ll also discuss the way the culture is used in both films, from my point of view, as well as their many strange similarities, however questionable they may seem.
Story
Coincidental Rushed Plot
Conceptually, The Book of Life uses the Mexican cultural holiday of The Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) to both kill and revive a character. It is really little more than a deus ex machina plot device by the end of the story. They establish the existence of the celebration at the beginning, but then it recedes to inconsequence. That is, until our recently killed hero, Manolo, passes a test of purity. All of a sudden we’re hit with the news that it’s the Day of the Dead again.
This gives way to a ton of coincidences. Coincidentally, this was also the day Manolo died; as well as the day his rival, Joaquin, and his love interest, Maria, are to be married; and, by pure chance, it’s also the day on of the villains, Chakal, attacks the village. This string of coincidences rush the story along a little too quickly and confusingly. Did they even bury Manolo before they got married? How long did they wait? Why couldn’t Joaquin protect the village without first marrying Maria?
Coincidences aside, the story is easy to follow and doesn’t lag anywhere. Although at times it does rush along a little too fast. Despite all this, the deaths of the characters, the big fight at the end, and even the hero’s redemption lacked any real strong emotional impact. Do we care that Manolo’s father and grandmother die? Not really, we kind of forget it happened. The characters surely don’t seem to care.
Well-Paced Fun Times
On the other hand, Coco focused on the Day of the Dead as a major plot point. Most of the story takes place that night, and it’s explained to the audience in a very non-condescending way what exactly it is and how it works. Throughout the film, the characters race to beat the clock and get Miguel back to the land of the living before the Day of the Dead ends. It’s a constant driving point, which neither rushes the story nor allows it to drag. When Miguel decides to find his great great-grandfather for a blessing, he does so knowing time’s already running out. He can’t stand the limitations his family forces on him, so he tries something else. He gets help, he forms a plan, and he follows through.
At no point did I ask myself “why didn’t Miguel do this instead?” or “what exactly happened?”. Instead, the story was easy to follow, with excellent timing. There are appropriate slow moments, some funny and exciting ones, and moments where the plot pleasantly throws you for a loop. The plot actually involved very heavy themes. While Manolo in The Book of Life was killed by a snake bite, it was from a strange mythical demonic-like character. When one of the major characters in Coco is murdered, he is poisoned by his best friend. The impact is much stronger.
Writing
Briefly, The Book of Life was written to appeal to a mainly American audience. For me, the culture seemed to only serve as a backdrop. The plot wasn’t anything particularly amazing, although fun, and the ending was predictable. There were also tons of deus ex machina moments in the film. From the Day of the Dead allowing the mythical characters to “bend the rules,” to the medal Joaquin wears, to the “Apology Song” destroying the monster. That isn’t to say the writing was horrible. It was fine, great even! For one, there were no glaring mistakes in the plot. Plus, there were rationalities for most of these elements, and the events had a logical flow. But timing-wise it was weak. I have no idea how much time passed since Manolo died until the end of the film. It all looks like one day, but it could have been several.
Coco, on the other hand, didn’t rely on deus ex machina to drive the story. While it too was written primarily for an American audience, the way they dealt with the cultural themes seemed more universal to me. The Day of the Dead was an essential theme throughout, along with music and family. The closest I could come up with to a deus ex machina were the spirit animals, but even they had a rhyme and reason to them. It was completely believable to me.
Characters
There really is too much to compare here for a short article. However, I will do my best. The characters from The Book of Life were relatively typical. You had the romantic hero with a literally pure heart (thanks to a magical plot device), a dashing jock that has too much confidence and egotism to be believable (again thanks to a magical plot device), and a rebellious young lady who is the Mary Jane of the film. She is educated, beautiful, refined, and trained in both sword fighting and martial arts. In short: she has no flaws whatsoever. She is even willing to marry someone she doesn’t love to protect her village. I would give these characters a B-, pretty typical and nothing special.
In Coco, you have the young boy discovering his place in the world. He secretly loves music despite his family’s hatred of it. He is the driving force of the movie and has wonderful personality quirks (such as his dimple trick) and flaws (such as his rebellious attitude against his family).
Then, you also have Hector, the deceased man who’s desperate to see his daughter again. Hector needs to get his picture in a family shrine or else he’ll officially be forgotten by everyone in his family. He struggles to help Miguel, hoping it’ll lead to seeing his daughter. But along the way, he discovers the truth about his own past that he never known otherwise. He grows and develops, and is fun and silly as well as deep and often conflicted.
Finally, you have Ernesto de la Cruz. In life, Ernesto was a confident, beloved musician, and in death his reputation and adoration make him hard to find. While he seems like the perfect man, you eventually learn his secret, and it becomes a major driving point to the plot. Granted, his transformation into the antagoist is abrupt, but also believable, unlike the villain in another snow-themed Disney film. I would give these characters an A- for their complexity and their intricate relations. No magical devices needed to make them interesting characters.
Music
Pop and Covers
The music in The Book of Life has bugged me for a long time. While it’s an important character attribute and a minor plot point, the music just didn’t feel right. To put it succinctly, the musicians were more concerned with performing covers of pop songs than producing original music. These covers felt forced to me, trying too hard to appeal to a mass audience.
The “Apology Song” was an original, and it works well in the film, but ultimately it is an apology to a bull for killing it. And it starts with the word “Toro,” severely limiting its emotional impact for me. I can’t picture myself singing this song to anyone who isn’t of the bovine persuasion. I understand this is an allegory, a song that is apologizing to his father and his ancestors and lineage, but the language used limits the emotional impact for me.
Another original song was “I Love You Too Much.” This is a fine song, with good lyrics and a tune. However, it’s just a typical sappy love song, not that it wasn’t good! I would say it is actually way better in Spanish (“Te Amo y Más”), but unfortunately that version doesn’t appear in the theatrical release of the film. The song “No Matter Where You Are” is a decent pop song at the end of the movie, and “Live Life” is another typical but good pop song which appears in the credits. Pretty much everything else was a cover, and as a result they were jarring. They were so distracting, I remembered how off they felt to me more than I recalled the other songs. At least they included Plácido Domingo, and allow him to sing a classic Mexican song, “Cielito Lindo”.
Striking The Right Chords
In Coco, the songs fit. None of them felt like pop songs played by a mariachi band. That’s because all the songs were either original songs or covers of traditional Mexican songs. At no point did I cringe as the main character sang about being a “creep.” In fact, I had a hard time telling which songs were traditional ones because they all fit so well. The music was often produced with Spanish mixed into them, such as “Un Poco Loco,” or was entirely in Spanish, such as in “La Llorona.” In addition, the film was made with an entirely Spanish version, and those songs were all included on the soundtrack.
The signature song, “Remember Me” (“Recuerdame”), appears in 4 different takes throughout the film. It can get repetative, but each time you get something different out of it. The first is the popular version sung as a classic song from back in the day, and it sounds like a man asking his lover to remember him. The second time you discover that it was written as a lullaby, and the song has a very different meaning. The final in-story version plays in the penultimate scene, and explaining any more would spoil the movie. But I can attest that the entire theater, including myself, was in tears during it. The last version is the modern day pop song which is fun because it includes both the Spanish and English versions in it sung as a duet.
Between the two of them, it is a mixed bag. I enjoyed the sountrack to Coco more in the long run, but mainly because it inlucded both the English and Spanish versions of everything. They both have some good memerable songs, and some problems. Remember Me has too many takes, and the pop song covers in BoL are too out of place.
Visuals
Both The Book of Life and Coco have great visuals. In fact, some are rather similar. The scenery of both films features massive, tall, colorful, fantastical landscapes. Both have a strong theme with the yellow petals, as is culturally appropriate, and both have fantastic character designs.
In The Book of Life, the story is told to children on a field trip. As such, all the characters are wooden dolls, which allows for some fun visuals and gags, and gives them a unique feel I really liked. The characteristics of the wood became characteristics of the characters. Even the dead characters had fun carvings on them, and there are plenty of opportunities for epic shots.
Coco didn’t do anything unusual in the style of the characters or world. However, their execution was exceptional, even exemplary. Most of this is due to the talent, technology, and budget they had, which makes it an unfair comparison. But it does make a difference. The City of the Remembered looks much grander and livelier and more colorful, and the skeletal character designs are well conceived and allow for fun gags. I would say Coco has the edge, but mainly due to the budget, while The Book of Life puts up a good fight for visuals, considering its limitations.
Culture
(A small disclaimer: I am a biased culturally-external person expressing my opinion; take it or leave it.) Both of these films handle Mexican culture very differently. The Book of Life doesn’t rely as much on culture as Coco does. However, when it goes to the cultural well, it relies mainly on tropes and stereotypes, such as matadors and luchadors. It does have some good mythical characters, though. Coco doesn’t focus on these stereotypes as much. Rather, it explains everything the audiences needs to know in a way that isn’t condescending. They present cultural ideas and traditions naturally and include some of their own ideas as well. It’s a great way to underscore the importance of these traditions, including their Spanish names, without annoying audience members already familiar with them. Whereas Coco portrays the culture in a positive and fantastic light, The Book of Life glosses over much of it.
And it is no wonder Coco does a good job of presenting the traditions and cultures of Mexico in my opinion: Disney/Pixar has done this before. During the production of Moana, Disney enlisted the help of Pacific Islanders. The creative team learned from them, talked with them, observed them, and integrated their findings into the film. Ultimately, this made Moana a culturally-accurate and engaging film. For Coco, Disney/Pixar took it one step further. They brought in a team of cultural experts, including critics of theirs, in order to get it right. What better way to make something work than to bring in someone who thinks you’re doing it wrong?
And it wasn’t just the Day of the Dead, but the music and art and people of Mexico that they studied. There are so many tiny things that speak volumes about the efforts they made. Little things such as Miguel’s grandmother throwing her shoe. The Book of Life lacked this level of subtlety.
Moreover, The Book of Life didn’t even use Hispanic actors for all the roles. However, it was produced by Guillermo del Toro, who was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico (but is of Spaniard descent), and directed by Jorge R. Gutierrez, who was born in Mexico City, Mexico. On the other hand, Coco found appropriate actors, which all sounded appropriate and could say the Spanish words properly. While most of the production team are not hispanic or Mexican, the co-director and co-writer, Adrian Molina, is a second generation Mexican-American.
The Book of Life fails for me in regards to casting, even though it mostly succeeds in the directing/producing talent. While many of the cast in Book of Life are Hispanic and have accents, most of the main characters are not. They don’t sound like they fit, they have no accents and don’t pronounce any Spanish words. Meanwhile, for me, Coco excels in the casting although they could have included more Mexican and hispanic people in the production staff.
Similarities
Ok, now for some weird conspiracy level stuff. There are a lot of coincidences and similarities between these two films.
Both of them have a strong focus on music, including protagonists who secretly yearn to be musicians. But not just any musician, a guitarist. Both have families that forbid and discourage their desire, which, of course, propels both films’ plots.
What’s more, each movie has a character who’s crushed beneath a bell and killed.
Both films end with the protagonist in an arena of sorts.
Music is the key plot device in both films, and a single song fixes their problems.
Each film features characters whose driving motivation is not being forgotten.
In The Book of Life, a major character dies from venom; in Coco, a major character dies from poison. Not much of a departure there.
Coco and The Book of Life both have a big focus on family, particularly on dead ancestors.
Both protagonists reject their family business.
Both families have a pair of deceased twins who are side characters.
The dead mother characters in both films look similar and have similar gray streaks in their hair.
With all these similarities, it begs to question: did Pixar plagiarize The Book of Life?
Well, after looking at the two films, I can say definitely not. Maybe team Coco got a few ideas or some inspiration from the earlier film, but its execution is very different. They don’t feel like the same film at all. In fact, they are very, very different movies.
The Book of Life is far more over-the-top with the themes, the magic, the characters, the styles. Which isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it lends itself well to animation. What’s more, it’s primarily a love story, cut and dry.
On the other hand, Coco takes a more realistic approach, making the characters and situations, as fantastic as they are, more believable. Unlike it’s predecessor, it’s a movie about family.
Conclusion
These are both good films. The Book of Life is fun, fantastical, stylized, and enjoyable. However, it is a flawed film. Many themes are overdone. The ending is mostly predictable. Cultural aspects are minimal and often stereotyped. The timing is confusing, and the pacing rushed at times. Nonetheless, it was a fun enjoyable movie.
But comparing it to Coco is unfair. Not only did Pixar have a huge budget and came out later, but the feel and concept are actually very different. There is no hero, no epic battle with a giant monster (or two), no gambling magicians, and no magical medals. In their place, we get a touching look at family, music, and acceptance. These characters struggle in real and complex ways. From a father who left his family, to a son who wants to be a musician, to a mother torn between love and long-lingering resentment.
Ultimately, Coco is superior. The story is more solid. Music flows seamlessly, fits the film’s mood, and is very catchy. The themes are universal and not overdone. Mexican culture is prevalent throughout the film and isn’t presented negatively. Visually, it’s beyond breathtaking. The characters are fun and flawed and conflicted. I won’t say Coco is a perfect film, or even Pixar’s best. But it is up there as one of their top 5 films. If they borrowed from The Book of Life, they did an excellent job of making it their own and improving on those ideas.
Coco may be a better film, at least to me, but that doesn’t mean The Book of Life isn’t a great film too. Both are highly rated, and I loved both. Remember that just because both films focus on the same holiday doesn’t mean you have to choose one over the other. I encourage you to see them both. And I encourage you to resist the urge to compare them. They are quite different, despite their similarities, and each deserves to be enjoyed for their own merits. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 70 | https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/awesome-reads/dominating-beauty-standards-4-reasons-why-high-beauty-standards-are-dangerous-50709/ | en | Dominating beauty standards: 4 reasons why high beauty standards are dangerous | https://static.toiimg.com/photo/75476733.cms | https://static.toiimg.com/photo/75476733.cms | [
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] | null | [] | 2023-02-20T00:00:00 | Fair skin, big eyes, a perfect jawline, sharp nose, pouty lips, a slim figure, and whatnot. Setting body and beauty standards is highly encouraged in this ignorant yet boastful 21st... | en | https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/icons/toifavicon.ico | Times of India Blog | https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/awesome-reads/dominating-beauty-standards-4-reasons-why-high-beauty-standards-are-dangerous-50709/ | Fair skin, big eyes, a perfect jawline, sharp nose, pouty lips, a slim figure, and whatnot. Setting body and beauty standards is highly encouraged in this ignorant yet boastful 21st century. The fact that appearances can be deceptive is familiar to many people but is acknowledged only by very few. People fail to appreciate themselves in all aspects they strive for, and the reason for this is the fear of being judged, and guess what? Society is judgmental above all. Beauty standards around the world are insanely irrational. They never remain the same, and the thirst for attuning to the standards is a never-ending process.
The world nurtures every beautiful creature with distinct characteristics, yet the people of the world set certain standards that segregate them from one another. Setting beauty ethics is one of the major reasons that forcefully made people change their lifestyles in this ever-changing world. These standards differ from culture to culture and from person to person.
Beauty standards have their own benefits. They also acquire positive effects that help people in many ways, but setting high standards is exceedingly harmful.
Instead of comprehending the fact that beauty is relative and subjective, half of the world’s population believes that grooming themselves according to higher standards will make them part of a community. Whereas the question is, why change yourself for someone else? It’s just that, society’s perspective is more important than their own.
Above all, the most horrid perspective is to change one’s whole self completely after being influenced. This exposes the backward logic of people living in this world.
What are beauty standards?
Beauty standards are a set of values applied to the appearance of both men and women to be regarded as beautiful and handsome in order to rightly fit in the community. These standards are concerned with people’s skin, hair, clothing, and other parts of the body.
Modern beauty norms follow impractically rough standards that are difficult to cope with. Women, in general, are supposed to inherit a good body image than men. Therefore, it is evident that many women are super conscious of their vanity. And hence, with the influence of great fashionistas, women are obsessed with beauty.
Every movie, series, short film, and advertisement showcases beautiful women and handsome hunks to attract people. Even more, social media nowadays encourages content creators to influence people around the world through their TikTok videos and reels. Without a doubt, these exposures lay the basic groundwork for setting body and beauty standards around the world.
Beauty Standards For a Woman
It is natural that every woman’s instinct is to look gorgeous, and there is nothing wrong with taking care of the body and skin. After all, appearance gives confidence to a person and enhances personality.
But the views of beauty over the years have been constantly changing, and women are continuously attempting to adapt themselves to the standards that were set during that time.
Back in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, women were not accustomed to social platforms but carried a natural, flawless beauty. Though certain trends were welcomed in the 1900s, women had no pressure and a complete obsession with those prevailing trends.
In the present, body and beauty benefits that were set back in the 20th century are restored again, but with extra effects with the arrival of effective beauty enhancers. Moreover, introducing new styles and trends every once in a while is one of the leading causes why women are stuck in making the grade to accomplish societal standards and their desires to become the so-called “most beautiful.”
The need to wholly submerge in the ideal standards can be for two main reasons, one being the societal context and the other being the obsession created by themselves or by social media.
Dominating Beauty Standards Around The World
There are numerous beauty standards set around the world that are positive as well as unrealistic. But few of these standards, despite their pros and cons, leave an everlasting impact on people.
Let’s learn what are the dominating beauty standards around the world
Korean Beauty Standards
Every k-drama watcher and K-pop fan would have known how the standards of beauty are the gold mine of South Korea. South Korea bags first place for setting one of the most dominant beauty standards in the world. Korean skincare products are today’s most preferred beauty essentials to look presentable, without a doubt.
The buzzing “glass skin” trend that stirred a fuss in other countries also had its true origin in Korea. This sensational ideal skin made both men and women set their hearts on the skincare routine to achieve such radiant, glowing skin which sooner or later spurred a sense of hyper-fixation among men and women.
Almost every Korean develops the desire to look appealing with whitening skin products, and therefore they put in the time and money to look attractive. Undoubtedly, the country follows the strictest beauty standards and has procured the highest position for cosmetic surgeries.
Having pale, flawless glass skin; big eyelids; a pointed nose and jawline; thigh gaps; and a petite, slim body are some of the major features of Korean beauty standards set for a female. Nose jobs, liposuction, and double eyelid surgeries are hugely fancied by many Koreans, including men, to reshape their bodies and features to look more attractive.
Korean face sheet masks have their own fanbase. They are the most sought-after beauty product all over the world, and they are bought in massive numbers. Face sheet masks and whitening skin products preferred by K-pop idols are highly bought by the netizen, which is an act of advertisement to obtain real beauty as per Korean standards.
Consequently, all these body and beauty positives raise the bar and set certain norms of beauty for males.
However, the paragon of male beauty includes a tall, clean-shaven face, pale skin, large eyes, a high nose, and a slim figure.
Since K-pop stars are the great influencers of Korean beauty standards, it is apparent that every fan globally attempts to change their lifestyle, be it unrealistic. Therefore, it is essential to understand that setting high body and beauty positives is dangerous. Following extremely dangerous starvation diets like the coffee diet, eating one meal a day, and going without eating for days can eventually lead to inevitable and dangerous health consequences.
The obsession with beauty is perceived in almost every Korean, and the urge to fit into society forecasts the country’s cultural struggles and cynical views in terms of beauty norms. As a result, women in Korea are most affected by these unrealistic beauty standards, which have led to an increase in the number of underweight young women. Thus, they are the victims of low self-esteem and self-confidence due to social conformity.
Western Beauty Standards
Are there any 90s kids who haven’t fallen head over heels when looking at F.R.I.E.N.D.S. sitcom star Rachel Green? That’s definitely out of the question for everyone.
“The Rachel Haircut” had a massive effect on almost every American during the late 90s. From adoring 90s top fashion icon Jennifer Aniston to being smitten with the most adorable Angelina Jolie for her defined facial shape, everyone’s grown up seeing Hollywood movies, and we love how the appearance of the characters perfectly matches their casual looks.
Because Hollywood stands as a powerful influencer, western beauty standards are always the talk of the town about its domination in the context of ideal standards of beauty. These standards are regarded as the global standard of beauty.
Since English rulings can be traced back to the period of colonization and imperialism, the country retains the essence of native soil impressions in and across Asia.
Who in the world is clueless about the amount of influence these Kardashians and Jenners hold today to sway the world?
Well, decades ago, the western archetype of beauty was notable for having white or light-skinned tones, million-dollar legs, and a slim figure. With the passage of time, the definition of beauty tends to change, and currently, the aesthetic figures of the Kardashians and the Jenners are set as the benchmark of western beauty.
So, what do the current western beauty standards look like?
Typically, a curvy figure, tanned skin, big eyes, plumpy lips, thick thighs, large busts, and big butts are the main aesthetic appeals for a female. Now, if you are wondering about how women get those big, fat lips, it is no surprise that all is set to go with lip fillers. Surgeries like breast augmentation are a dime a dozen in western countries, promoting unhealthy figures to attain the highest level of beauty.
By no means could anyone ever neglect the fact that western beauty standards are ranked the highest for possessing the most dominant beauty standards in the world.
Simply put, all Asian beauty idealization and other prevalent beauty standards worldwide are by-products of Western beauty. Therefore, western body and beauty stereotypes are widely spread from country to country and culture to culture.
Countries such as Japan, China, Korea, Lebanon, and the Middle East have been heavily influenced by the western acme of beauty, though there has been little difference in the applied aesthetic norms in recent years. Countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, Latin America, and India use skin-bleaching agents to lighten their skin tone.
Top fashion icons and supermodels flashed in the magazine inspire everyone with their new styles and looks with their every comeback. This becomes a burning desire in the hearts of every woman to look as pretty as a picture displayed on the television.
Western countries, being the most beauty-obsessed, are also the biggest manufacturers of cosmetics that are used by people worldwide. They are the epitome of universal standards of beauty, with the highest sales in the beauty markets. The media especially infatuates young females and schoolchildren, who are prone to these unrealistic and toxic beauty standards.
Embracing unrealistic beauty standards is the main cause of the increase in racism, where skin color defines a person’s characteristics. Many people feel insecure and have developed a sense of loss within themselves. They are mentally and emotionally triggered by social media or by the judgments made by society about their looks. And people who love to groom themselves are obsessed to the point that they fail to recognize they are reaching for an extreme level of change, which would open doors to all different kinds of health problems.
Reasons Why High Beauty Standards Around The World are Toxic and Dangerous
1. Body Dysmorphia
It is estimated that approximately 2 percent of the population is affected by body dysmorphia. Unrealistic beauty standards lead to body dysmorphia, which is a mental health disorder developed in a person who immerses themselves in a sea of disappointment pertaining to their looks. They believe that their appearance has more defects than anyone else’s. This serious disorder is more likely to be seen in young teenagers and adults. Symptoms include continuously looking in the mirror, finding minor flaws, attempting to cover them through makeup, avoiding social situations, and many more. Many a time, the flaws are just in the person’s imagination. Both males and females are equally affected by body dysmorphia.
2. Negative Emotions
When a woman is acknowledged as ugly, she certainly develops negative emotions within her and continues to water them until they grow into anxiety. There is no doubt that setting beauty norms catalyzes negative emotions such as low self-esteem and a very low level of confidence in a person, especially in women. These negative emotions eventually make the person mentally unstable and prevent them from indulging in social activities. The person feels flustered and embarrassed about his or her looks, eventually making him or her anxious and consequently leading to a depressed state.
Self–hatred is another negative emotion that unfolds in the person who fails to embrace his own self. He fails to spot the difference between his thoughts and society’s perception and thus starts to hate himself, despite knowing that these negative body images and standards are man-made.
3. Eating Disorders
With the advent of social media, eating disorders are on the rise. An eating disorder is a serious mental health state that is concerned with abnormal eating behavior and has a negative effect on the person’s physical and psychological health. Statistics on eating disorders revealed that global eating disorders have increased from 3.4% to 7.8%. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, around 70 million people internationally are subjected to food disorders. Apart from societal standards, social media is one of the main reasons for the increase in this kind of disorder. Women feel the urge to transform themselves after being influenced by the media and by constant societal pressures. Also, their intent to look drop-dead gorgeous completely creates an obsession with losing weight and becoming thin. Negative body image concerns are developed in the minds of many females, and therefore they attempt to starve and opt for dangerous diets.
Anorexia nervosa is a disorder caused by starvation and an extreme diet. Another pervasive eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, is caused by fasting, purging, taking laxatives, or exercising to avoid weight gain after binge eating.
4. Toxic Beauty Standards Lead to Suicidal Thoughts
Knowing that the world solicits different cultures and people who are as different as chalk and cheese, man-made aesthetic norms of beauty exhort them to compare, whether Asian or Western. In modern days, many women feel envious of the beauty of others. They have a proclivity to compare their appearance to that of others. All these negative thoughts and pressures subsequently lead to suicidal thoughts. Statistics on suicidal thoughts due to body image revealed that about 10% of women have hurt themselves because of body dissatisfaction, and about 13% of adults have developed suicidal thoughts and feelings after going into a long-distressed state.
Teenagers are hugely affected by the persuasive beauty standards around the world. The mental health foundation confirmed that one in eight adults in the UK had developed the idea of suicide due to body dissatisfaction.
Beauty standards around the world will continue to evolve, and the world will constantly revolve around new generations. New values will be inherited in society as societal standards progress. But accepting the quixotic standards set by society is like disregarding your self-love and confidence for those toxic norms of beauty.
All humans have flaws that are seemingly beautiful in their ways. A beautiful appearance may betray many, but only a beautiful heart defines real beauty. True beauty lies in accepting yourself.
Every woman must recognize that the feminine beauty ideal is not the true definition of beauty. They are temporary and continue to fluctuate. Wearing makeup and making bodily changes would give boldness to a woman, but only to a certain extent. The more natural, the more comfortable.
Almost all of us have come across people saying these phrases: “You have got acne,” “you look dark,” ‘why are you so fat’ or ‘you are too skinny to look attractive’
Next time, never forget to remind them that beauty does not form a beautiful character. | ||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 25 | https://www.womenshistorymonth.gov/ | en | Women's History Month 2024 | [
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Dorothea Lange: Seeing People - American photographer Dorothea Lange made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Featuring some 100 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasizing her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism.
Image Credit: Dorothea Lange, Migratory Workers Harvesting Peas near Nipomo, California, spring 1937, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.
¡De última hora! Latinas Report Breaking News
“¡De última hora! Latinas Report Breaking News” is a bilingual exhibition showcasing the work of Latina broadcast journalists and how they wrote the first draft of history for major U.S. events for the Spanish-language communities they report on and for.
Image credit: Lori Montenegro reporting from Washington, D.C., 2018. Image courtesy of Telemundo through the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Pattern and Paradox: The Quilts of Amish Women
Explore the creative practice of Amish quilters in the United States. Pattern and Paradox: The Quilts of Amish Women looks beyond quilting as a utilitarian practice. In the late nineteenth century, Amish women adopted an artform already established within the larger American culture and made it distinctly their own, developing community and familial preferences, with women sharing work, skills, and patterns.
Image credit: Unidentified Maker, Crazy Star; ca. 1920, Arthur, Illinois, cotton and wool; 74 x 63 ½ in. (detail), Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown, Promised gift to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
National Park Service Celebrates Women's History Month
Explore women's history in national parks and in places in communities across the country to discover women of all cultures providing healing and hope. Learn how women continue to lead in these roles in stewardship and conservation of America's natural and cultural treasures today.
Image credit: Image designed by the National Park Service
The Women of Five Wars
The limited but important roles women played in Korea and Vietnam paved the path to more expanded -- and in some cases more dangerous -- specialties in recent wars.
Image credit: Fort Wayne News Sentinel image of Mary Weiss Hester of the 801st Medical Air Evacuation Squadron caring for a wounded patient onboard a C-47 Skytrain. January 1953. (Library of Congress)
Women They Talk About: Documenting Early Women Filmmakers with the American Film Institute—Teachers Guide
Women actively participated in shaping the nascent film industry of the early twentieth century, both as screen stars and behind the camera. But why is this history missing from our understanding of early Hollywood?
Image credit: Promotional poster for silent film directed by Lois Weber. Image by Burton Rice for Bluebird Photoplays (Life time: pre-1925 publication of advertisement by defunct film company; expired copyright) - Original publication: The Moving Picture World (New York, N.Y.) | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 84 | https://www.businessinsider.com/best-breakup-movies-relationship-split | en | 25 of the best breakup movies to watch after the end of a relationship | https://i.insider.com/5e5831e6a9f40c277b4355d6?width=1200&format=jpeg | https://i.insider.com/5e5831e6a9f40c277b4355d6?width=1200&format=jpeg | [
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Following a breakup, films about revenge, healing, and redemption can be cathartic.
For those angry about their ex, "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" and "Gone Girl" have revenge-driven plots.
But "Before Sunrise" and "Someone Great," however, have uplifting and empowering messages.
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Losing someone, for better or for worse, can be extremely difficult.
One of the easiest ways to begin exploring your emotions in the aftermath of the breakup is to turn on a film. And when it comes to great breakup movies, there's no shortage of options.
Should you hold on to some resentment for your former partner, there are plenty of films filled with revenge, including "Kill Bill: Vol. 1," "Midsommar," and "Gone Girl." If you're seeking a more uplifting viewing experience, "Before Sunrise" and "Bridget Jones's Diary" will instill hope for a brighter future ahead.
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .
Here are 25 films to watch after going through a breakup.
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"Someone Great" tracks the aftermath of an abrupt breakup.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%
After Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) lands her dream job across the country, her boyfriend of nine years (Lakeith Stanfield) breaks up with her. With hilarious friends Erin (DeWanda Wise) and Blair (Brittany Snow) by her side, Jenny struggles to make sense of the breakup and her impending move from New York City.
The Netflix original doesn't take itself too seriously, weaving in laughs between painfully raw flashbacks of Jenny's former relationship, but it does capture the confusion and loss that comes with an abrupt split.
"Someone Great" is a new type of breakup film, challenging its viewers to appreciate the lessons they learned from their exes, rather than to hate them.
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Two people erase their memories of each other in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 92%
Have you ever been so angry with someone that you wish you never met them? In the 2004 film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) and Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) are so fed up with their fights that each of them hires a firm to permanently erase all their memories of their relationship.
When they unintentionally meet up after their procedures, they're immediately drawn to each other without realizing that they've dated in the past. Their files are eventually leaked from the firm, and they have to decide whether or not they should stay broken up or try to build a new relationship together.
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"Under the Tuscan Sun" proves that healing can happen in unlikely places.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 62%
The 2003 film is based on the memoir of the same name written by Frances Mayes. After a San Francisco-based journalist learns that her husband has been cheating on her with a much younger woman, Frances (Diane Lane) falls into a deep depression. In an effort to make her feel better, her friends gift her a trip to Italy.
While she's on the trip, she capriciously buys a neglected villa in the remote countryside and begins to renovate. Along the way, she meets new friends, faces new challenges on her own, and begins to process her divorce.
Uplifting and filled with corny laughs, "Under the Tuscan Sun" shows that with the right mindset, breakups can lead to new adventure.
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A woman seeks revenge after she's attacked in her wedding dress in "Kill Bill: Vol. 1."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 85%
In Quentin Tarantino's 2003 action film "Kill Bill: Vol. 1," The Bride (Uma Thurman) seeks revenge on her former boss and lover after he tried to kill her at her wedding.
Filled with high-energy fight scenes, "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" is a comeback story that's guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat.
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Four high schoolers team up on their ex-boyfriend in "John Tucker Must Die."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 28%
What happens when three high school girls find out that they're all dating the same boy? They hatch a plan for a fourth girl to break his heart.
In the 2006 film "John Tucker Must Die," the unlikely squad of Kate (Brittany Snow), Heather (Ashanti), Beth (Sophia Bush), and Carrie (Arielle Kebbel) desperately want revenge on the most popular boy in school, John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe).
And while the romantic comedy shows just how messy breakups can be, it also shows that some people never change — no matter how many humiliating pranks you try to pull on them.
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A woman with a seemingly perfect life breaks up with her boyfriend in the 2018 film "Nappily Ever After"
Rotten Tomatoes score: 67%
Violet (Sanaa Lathan) seems to have it all: a great job, a steady relationship, and gorgeous hair. After her boyfriend Clint (Ricky Whittle) doesn't propose to her, she breaks up with him and sees him with a new woman shortly after.
In a tale of reinvention and self-discovery based on the book by Trisha R. Thomas, Violet shaves her head and begins to question what it takes to make herself truly happy, independent of what others think.
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A dumpee schools her ex-boyfriend in "Legally Blonde."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 71%
After her boyfriend breaks up with her before leaving for Harvard Law School, Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) decides to follow him there, confident that they'll rekindle as classmates.
The sorority president is accepted to the elite law school, only to find that her ex has a new fiancé. In response, Woods dives headfirst into her coursework, determined to prove herself as a top student.
Unapologetically herself despite numerous barriers standing in her way, Elle proves her critics wrong and emerges from her breakup stronger than ever in "Legally Blonde."
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A man realizes that he's glorified his ex in "500 Day of Summer."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 85%
The 2009 film follows Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an architect-turned-greeting card writer who immediately falls hard for Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). "500 Days of Summer" launches into a non-linear timeline of their relationship, with Tom playing out their conversations, dates, and time spent together in the aftermath of having his heart broken by Summer.
Confused and struggling with depression following the breakup, Tom realizes that he's only been remembering the positive aspects of their relationship and decides to turn his life around.
An emotional roller-coaster, "500 Days of Summer" doesn't sugarcoat the pain that comes at the end of a relationship, but it does give you permission to look back if it will allow you to move forward.
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"The Break-Up" is difficult to watch, but it holds an important message.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 34%
After buying a condominium together, Gary Grobowski (Vince Vaughn) and Brooke Meyers (Jennifer Aniston) call it quits on their relationship. Neither of them wants to move out of the space, so they agree to coexist as roommates — until they pester each other so much that they sell the condo.
Between last-minute efforts to save their relationship to moments of acceptance, the 2006 film "The Break-Up" proves that even the most complicated, painful endings don't have to remain nasty forever.
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"La La Land" will both break your heart and give you hope.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 91%
In the 2016 Oscar-winning musical "La La Land," Mia (Emma Stone) plays a struggling actress who meets a nostalgic jazz musician named Sebastian (Ryan Gosling). Both trying to make it in Los Angeles, they start a relationship, which is shot in scenes and musical numbers reminiscent of the "Singin' in the Rain" and "An American in Paris" era of film.
Eventually, their wildest dreams come to fruition, and they must reckon with the decision to either pursue their careers or stay together.
And despite the heartbreak in the latter half of the film, "La La Land" is a testament to appreciating the person who was once in your life — even if the relationship doesn't last past the closing epilogue.
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"Midsommar" is a breakup movie shrouded in horror.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%
After Dani (Florence Pugh) loses her family in a tragic accident, she decides to join her increasingly-distant boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends to attend a remote festival called Midsommar in a Swedish village.
The trip turns sinister as the visitors realize that they're trapped by a cult, and each of them has an involuntary role to play in the festival. Dani, who leaned on Christian after her loss despite his veering attention, eventually pulls the plug on her relationship.
A horror film filled its fair share of gore and stomach-turning moments, "Midsommar" ultimately shows that a bad breakup can feel as final as death.
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"Call Me by Your Name" artfully captures a summer romance.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 94%
Based on the 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman, "Call Me by Your Name" follows 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer) as they form feelings for one another during a summer spent in rural Italy.
Their secret relationship plays out in a series of scenes that look more like watercolor paintings than real-life moments: scenic bike rides, afternoons reading in the sun, and hikes through waterfalls.
The summer eventually comes to an end, and they must part ways as Oliver returns to graduate school in the United States. The closing scene, in conjunction with the film's soundtrack, will make you cry — but you'll be grateful for the opportunity to witness their romance nonetheless.
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"Before Sunrise" is a romantic film about two young strangers who meet on a train.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 100%
Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American traveling through Europe to get over a broken relationship, notices a Parisian named Celine (Julie Delpy) reading on a train.
Although they're headed to different cities, Jesse convinces Celine to get off the train with him in Vienna, and they spend the night walking the streets and delving into philosophical conversations about life, literature, and love.
"Before Sunrise" is dialogue-heavy, demonstrating the connection between Jesse and Celine and hinting that the duo met on the train for a reason. They're forced to say goodbye when morning inevitably comes, but the film instills hope about the unpredictability of the future.
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"Sliding Doors" shows that one tiny moment can change the entire course of a person's life.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 65%
The 1998 film demonstrates the domino effect that one tiny moment can have on a person's life.
"Sliding Doors" shows two versions of Helen Quilley (Gwyneth Paltrow)'s life. The only difference is that she boards a train in one of them, arriving home in time to catch her boyfriend cheating, and misses the train in the other version, in turn arriving too late to find him in bed with another woman.
The fleeting moment echoes itself throughout the remainder of Helen's life, reminding viewers that every decision leads to new beginnings, even if they aren't readily apparent.
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The 2000 film "High Fidelity" is based off of the novel by Nick Hornby.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 91%
After vinyl shop owner Rob Gordon (John Cusack) is dumped by his longtime girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle), he begins to rehash his "Top Five" failed relationships in an attempt to wrap his head around losing Laura.
Frustrated with himself and desperate to find a reason for why he isn't further along in life, Rob eventually begins to ask himself whether or not he's been a problem. "High Fidelity" serves as a good reminder to look inward first.
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A woman tries to break off her best friend's engagement in the 1997 film "My Best Friend's Wedding."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 74%
As students at Brown University, Michael O'Neal (Dermot Mulroney) and Julianne Potter (Julia Roberts) promise each other that they'll get married if they're both single at 28 years old. Shortly before Michael's 28th birthday, he calls Julianne to tell her that he's getting married to Kimmy Wallace (Cameron Diaz).
Upon hearing the news, Julianne has an epiphany, realizing that she's in love with her best friend. She sets out on a mission to break off his engagement, hoping that he'll choose her instead.
A movie about friendship, love, and sacrifice, "My Best Friend's Wedding" shows that things don't always go according to plan. And life doesn't end when you turn 28.
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"Eat Pray Love" follows a recently divorced woman on her around-the-world journey.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 35%
Based on Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, the 2010 film "Eat Pray Love" hones in on Liz's (Julia Roberts) life after her seemingly perfect marriage ends. She decides to embark on her own adventure and sets off for a solo trip to Italy, India, and Bali.
She eats gelato, dances at an Indian wedding, and flirts on Bali's beaches, proving that self-discovery and adventure can go a long way in mending a broken heart.
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A composer stays at the same resort as his ex and her new boyfriend in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%
Depressed after his relationship with actress Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) ends, Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) takes a tropical vacation in the hopes of getting over the breakup. Shortly after arriving, he learns that Sarah and her new rock star boyfriend are staying at the same resort as him.
Out of pity, the concierge Rachel Jansen (Mila Kunis) offers him a top suite, and they begin to spend time together. Eventually, Peter must choose between Rachel and Sarah.
"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" hysterically demonstrates the temptation to rekindle with an ex before realizing that the breakup happened for a reason.
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A woman frames her cheating husband for murder in "Gone Girl."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 88%
When Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) discovers that her husband (Ben Affleck) is having an affair with one of his students, she takes off, framing him for her sudden disappearance.
Based on the book by Gillian Flynn, the 2014 film "Gone Girl" allows the audience to witness both sides of the constructed crime as it plays out, leaving it up to viewers to decide who is truly guilty.
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"Bridget Jones's Diary" is a tale of reinvention.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 80%
Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) is a lonely woman in her 30s with an unrequited crush on her boss. After reaching a breaking point, Bridget grows determined to get her life together: exercising, dressing up for work, and journaling about her feelings. But when she becomes the center of a love triangle, her life becomes complicated.
A reinterpretation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," this 2001 film is filled with cringe-worthy, laugh-out-loud moments that will inevitably leave you in a better mood.
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In the 1996 film "The First Wives Club," three college friends try to find dirt on their exes.
Rotten Tomatoes score: 50%
Three friends reunite in "The First Wives Club" after one of their college companions passes away. After catching up, Annie (Diane Keaton), Brenda (Bette Midler), and Elise (Goldie Hawn) realize that they have all been wronged by their former partners and begin to hatch a plan.
As the club members dig up incriminating and embarrassing information in an effort to ruin their exes' lives, the women begin to learn things about themselves as well.
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Separate storylines play out in "He's Just Not That Into You."
Rotten Tomatoes score: 41%
From a woman who's overly eager about each man she meets to a man caught cheating on his wife with a yoga instructor, the 2009 film "He's Just Not That Into You" provides a brutal look at the pain and difficulty that often comes with struggling relationships.
And while four different scenarios play out, the answer might be more simple than the nine main characters want to accept: the other person might not be the right person for them.
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Two women, one living near London, and one living in Los Angeles, decide to swap homes for Christmas after romantic troubles in "The Holiday"
Rotten Tomatoes score: 50%
Iris Simpkins (Kate Winslet) is heartbroken when she realizes her ex-boyfriend Jasper Bloom (Rufus Sewell) has moved on and gotten engaged during the Christmas period.
And in a spur-of-the-moment decision, Iris swaps her idyllic cottage in the UK for a swanky Los Angeles mansion owned by Amanda Woods (Cameron Diaz), whose own relationship has just gone down in flames.
The pair live in each other's houses for the holidays, getting over their respective romantic issues with flings that could become something more serious.
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When three women discover they've all been dating the same man, they plot to get their revenge in "The Other Woman"
Rotten Tomatoes score: 26%
When Carly (Cameron Diaz) tries to surprise her new boyfriend Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) with a sexy outfit, she meets Kate (Leslie Mann), his wife. After Carly confesses what's been going on, she and Kate discover that Mark actually has another girlfriend, Amber (Kate Upton).
After some arguing, the trio gets their revenge on Mark by uncovering his shady work tactics and embezzlement.
This story was originally published on February 24, 2020, and most recently updated on November 6, 2023.
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5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 48 | https://bryantpark.org/activities/movie-nights | en | Movie Nights | [
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] | null | [] | null | Bryant Park is located between 40th and 42nd Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues behind the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman building. | en | /favicon.png | null | The lawn opens 5pm, weather permitting, for blankets and picnicking
Films begin 8pm
All packages including bags, briefcases, and backpacks are subject to inspection
No dogs allowed on the lawn
No chairs, tables, plastic ground coverings (including sheets, tarps, bags, pads, and/or yoga mats) are permitted on the lawn.
Forgot a blanket? Buy one at the Bryant Park Shop on the Fountain Terrace.
Hester Street Fair hosts food vendors on the Fountain Terrace with drinks and delicious snack and meal options
Stout NYC has alcoholic beverages available
Captions are displayed for each film.
For the protection of all Movie Nights attendees, all bags, briefcases, backpacks, etc. will be inspected before entering the lawn area (the lawn and surrounding gravel area).
Should you leave the lawn area, all packages, bags, etc. will be inspected again upon re-entry. The checkpoints are necessary to safeguard all those in attendance at Bryant Park Movie Nights.
Enjoy the film!
Hester Street Fair brings the city’s best vendors to the Fountain Terrace each week, 4pm-8:30pm, to make your Movie Nights picnic the most delicious it can be .
Starting at 5pm, stop by our bar tent at the back of the lawn for summer-ready drinks, featuring special offerings from Stout NYC.
Forgot a blanket? Stop by the Bryant Park Shop for a cute blanket, apparel, games, our apiary honey, and more!
June 10: Forrest Gump (1994)
Starring Tom Hanks, directed by Robert Zemeckis
Slow-witted Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) has never thought of himself as disadvantaged, and thanks to his supportive mother (Sally Field), he leads anything but a restricted life. Whether dominating on the gridiron as a college football star, fighting in Vietnam, or captaining a shrimp boat, Forrest inspires people with his childlike optimism. But the one person Forrest cares about most may be the most difficult to save — his childhood love, the sweet but troubled Jenny (Robin Wright).
June 17: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Starring Matt Damon, directed by Anthony Minghella
To be young and carefree amid the blue waters and idyllic landscape of sun-drenched Italy in the late 1950s? That's la dolce vita Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) craves and Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) leads. When Dickie's father asks Tom to bring his errant playboy son back home to America, Dickie and his beautiful expatriate girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), never suspect the dangerous extremes to which Ripley will go to make their lifestyle his own.
June 24: Boomerang (1992)
Starring Eddie Murphy, directed by Reginald Hudlin
A cocky ad executive, Marcus (Eddie Murphy) has a reputation as a ladies' man. Marcus, however, gets a taste of his own medicine when a merger finds him working under the beautiful Jacqueline (Robin Givens), who has a similarly cavalier attitude about romance. Marcus and Jacqueline become involved, but he is put off by her noncommittal approach to their relationship. Meanwhile, Marcus also begins to develop feelings for the pretty Angela (Halle Berry), who is more thoughtful than Jacqueline.
July 1: Gladiator (2000)
Starring Russell Crowe, directed by Ridley Scott
The Roman emperor's son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), is enraged when he is passed over as heir in favor of his father's favorite general, Maximus (Russell Crowe). Commodus kills his own father (Richard Harris), then arranges the murder of the Maximus and his family. Maximus narrowly escapes, only to be sold as a slave and trained as a gladiator, but his subsequent popularity in the arena threatens the throne.
July 8: Old School (2003)
Starring Luke Wilson, directed by Todd Phillips
After discovering his girlfriend (Juliette Lewis) has been participating in illicit affairs, attorney Mitch (Luke Wilson) feels his world come undone. He moves into a new place, which happens to be near a college campus, and tries to get his life back together. Two of his best friends, Frank (Will Ferrell) and Beanie (Vince Vaughn), start hanging out at Mitch's house, eventually turning the place into a wild party pad, much to the ire of the college's dean, Gordon "Cheese" Pritchard (Jeremy Piven), who aims to make their lives difficult.
July 15: Funny Face (1957)
Starring Audrey Hepburn, directed by Stanley Donen
Dispatched on an assignment, New York City-based fashion photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) is struck by the beauty of Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), a shy bookstore employee he photographed by accident, who he believes has the potential to become a successful model. He gets Jo to go with him to France, where he snaps more pictures of her against iconic Parisian backdrops. In the process, they fall for one another, only to find hurdles in their way.
July 29: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)
Starring Kate Hudson, directed by Donald Petrie
An advice columnist who’d prefer to write about politics, Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) tries pushing the boundaries of what she can write about in her new piece about how to get a man to leave you in 10 days. Her editor, Lana (Bebe Neuwirth), loves it, and Andie goes off to find a man she can use for the experiment. Enter executive Ben Berry (Matthew McConaughey), who is so confident in his romantic prowess that he thinks he can make any woman fall in love with him in 10 days. When Andie and Ben meet, both their plans backfire.
August 5: Arrival (2016)
Starring Amy Adams, directed Denis Villeneuve
When gigantic spacecraft touch down in 12 locations around the world, linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) leads an elite team of investigators. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks and her crew must race against time to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Hoping to unravel the mystery, she takes a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly all of mankind. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 7 | https://cancerqld.org.au/blog/30-movies-youll-want-to-watch-at-your-girls-night-in/ | en | 30 movies you’ll want to watch at your Girls’ Night In | [
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] | null | [] | 2021-09-08T01:51:43+00:00 | If you've been run off your feet, a movie night with the girls is the best therapy! Host a Girls' Night In and raise funds to change lives. | en | https://cancerqld.org.au/favicon.ico | Cancer Council Queensland | https://cancerqld.org.au/blog/30-movies-youll-want-to-watch-at-your-girls-night-in/ | If you’ve been run off your feet all week, a Girls’ Night In movie night – complete with a pile of blankets, snacks and your besties – is the only answer.
So, call up your friends, get your snacks in order and spend a night in. You can donate what you would have spent on a night out, to vital work in prevention, education and research into women’s cancers.
You don’t even have to stress about choosing what to watch…we’ve rounded up 30 flicks that practically require you to view them in the presence of your favourite gal pals.
From love stories to hilarious flicks, these movies will help you ease into the weekend—with your BFFs by your side. Plus, you’ve likely seen them before, so you can catch up on what’s been happening in each other’s lives without worrying about missing plot clues.
My Best Friend’s Wedding
The unrequited love and heartbreak tugs at your heart strings.
27 Dresses
Always a bridesmaid, never a bride – so relatable. This is the perfect movie to get in the mood if you’ve got a big wedding season ahead.
The Notebook
This might be the most romantic movie of all time. The love triangle. The old couple reminiscing. Make sure to have some tissues on hand
Dear John
Again with the tears. Who doesn’t love a chick flick with Channing Tatum?
Love Actually
Nothing really needs to be said here…apart from, why wait until Christmas to watch this gem?!
Bridesmaids
What goes better together than love and comedy? Everyone wants to be the maid of honour.
Clueless
As if! Get into 90s nostalgia with Cher and her friends, who have the ridiculous outfits and hilarious one-liners to lift your mood.
The Devil Wears Prada
Need a little motivation to follow your dreams? New jobs are always interesting…and the fashion alone makes this movie worth a watch.
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants
There is nothing more awesome than watching four best friends going on adventures and generally being there for each other.
Ever After
We all love a movie that ends with happily ever after.
Crazy Stupid Love
Divorce, new relationships, Ryan Gosling – it has it all!
Pitch Perfect
From the singing to the non-stop jokes, this is one flick you can’t watch too many times. You could even have a Lip Sync Battle to the songs!
Dirty Dancing
Who wouldn’t want to spend summer at a resort with a gorgeous dance instructor?
Mean Girls
Some of the mean girl moments are out of control, but it’s the only flick that includes “mathletes”, puking on a crush, and a person getting hit by a bus and still making it to prom.
Legally Blonde
Sure, a bit ditzy – but #girlpower. You can’t beat a plot line focused on a woman smashing everyone’s expectations.
10 Things I Hate About You
Based on Shakepeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’ and featuring Heath Ledger, this movie is sweet, funny and “just too good to be true”.
Friends with Benefits
Attractive actors, a typical romcom story line and a happy, sappy ending. The complete chick flick package.
Bridget Jones’ Diary
Watching Bridget may help you realise how much you *actually* do have your life together. And, who doesn’t love Hugh Grant?
Letters to Juliet
A modern twist on the timeless classic.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Awkward in all the right ways. A classic comedy and chick flick. Plus, you can watch the sequel afterwards!
Mamma Mia
Get ready to bust out some tunes.
Notting Hill
We all wish we were dating a movie star. Another Hugh Grant classic.
Pretty in Pink
When in doubt, break out a classic.
Sweet Home Alabama
No one forgets their first love.
The Vow
Rachel McAdams does it again.
Two Weeks’ Notice
Hugh Grant again…well, he was the rom com king. Opposites attract in this cute flick.
The Holiday
Jude Law brings the accent, while Jack Black brings the humour. Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz as the female leads – #winning.
Leap Year
Based off an old Irish folklore tradition where a woman can propose to a man on a leap day. It’s quite a predictable movie but it will definitely make you go ‘aww!’
No Reservations
Warning: You may have to fill up with the popcorn, with all the food shots in this film. The plot is based on Kate, a chef who struggles with life after learning she’s the guardian of her late sister’s daughter, until Nick, who’s personality is the complete opposite, comes into the picture.
The Proposal
Witty and adorable.
Excited to have a movie night?
Join women across the state who will host or attend a Girls’ Night In this year! Whether it’s an intimate evening with your besties or an online gathering, we know it’ll be a blast!
All funds raised will be invested in vital cancer research, patient support services and prevention programs for women affected by breast and gynaecological cancers.
When you register, you’ll receive a free host kit to help you get the party started. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 51 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/entertainment/article/best-comedy-movies-of-all-time/ | en | The 25 Best Comedy Movies Of All Time | [
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] | 2023-12-18T10:59:32-05:00 | Explore this curated list of the best comedy movies of all time. From timeless classics to modern gems, we've got the ultimate collection of funny films. | en | Forbes | https://www.forbes.com/sites/entertainment/article/best-comedy-movies-of-all-time/ | Writing a definitive list of the best comedy films ever made is hard. Not only has the genre been around since the late 1800s, but there are many types of comedy movies: rom-coms, screwballs, slapsticks. But sometimes, you just need a good laugh. So, what makes something a “best comedy movie?” The easy answer is that it has to be funny. However, it’s more than that. Great comedy movies stand the test of time. Comedy, as a genre, has a reputation for aging poorly to the point that many critics ask, can comedy age well? Many comedies pull off this feat and become classics. These classics come with endlessly quotable lines, iconic scenes, and jokes that we want to watch again and again.
Funniest Movies (25-11)
Comedy is subjective, but some movies are just funny … full stop. A great comedy can be rewatched, quoted and revisited. While you won’t find the highest-grossing comedy movie on this list (it’s 2023’s Barbie, if you are wondering,) you will find box office titans and even a couple of commercial flops that achieved cult status after the fact.
This full list includes films from the 1930s to 2010s, and directors such as Mel Brooks, Adam McKay, John Huges and Stanely Kubrick. While complying a best comedies list, it is essential to look at subgenres. Comedies on this list include satires, mockumentaries, dark humor, rom-coms, teen comedies and even a musical comedy. There are so many types of comedy; all can be done well in the right hands.
25. My Cousin Vinny (1992)
This film taught an entire generation about the features of the Chevy Bel Air. The whole movie is exceptionally quotable and has a devoted fan base, partially thanks to the powerhouse performances of Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei. Tomei’s performance even earned her an Oscar nom for Best Supporting Actress.
While the film only garnered 2.5 stars from Roger Ebert in 1992, the movie now boasts an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes from both fans and critics. The story follows an inexperienced lawyer, the titular Vinny, as he tries to free two Brooklyn college students falsely accused of murder in Alabama. The film became a classic through DVD and VHS rentals, which almost adds to the perfect 1990s nature of this now classic comedy. Currently, My Cousin Vinny is available to rent on Amazon Prime, Youtube, Apple TV and Google Play… if you can’t find a Blockbuster.
24. Step Brothers (2008)
The bro-comedy dominated the 2000s. While Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler flicks grounded this subgenre in the mid-2000s, buddy comedies are nothing new and have been popular with audiences since names like Laurel and Hardy were on marquees. Step Brothers feels like a classic buddy comedy.
In the film, directed by Adam McKay, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play adult step-brothers forced to live together as their aging parents remarry. The wackiness of the premise is part of what makes Step Brothers a laugh-out-loud comedy. The film received mixed reviews on its initial run but has garnered a cult classic status in subsequent years. A lot of that status has to do with the powerhouse performances that this movie boasts, not only from the leads but also Richard Jenkins, who plays Reilly’s father. It is currently streaming for free on the Roku Channel.
23. The Big Sick (2017)
The Big Sick is a rom-com, a com-com and a profoundly human film. The BFI credited the movie for refreshing the rom-com genre. The film stars Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan and was directed by Michael Showalter.
The semi-autobiographical film follows the early romance between Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, as she battles adult-onset Still’s Disease. Gordon and Nanjiani wrote the screenplay together. While the movie received good reviews, it also drew criticism for its depiction of Desi women. Something that Nanjiani has since apologized for. The film is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime.
22. The Addams Family (1991)
Many family comedies are created based on existing intellectual property, and many fail to capture the feeling of the source material while still standing on their own as a film. The Addams Family impressively does both. Based on the comics and TV show of the same name, The Addams Family does cartoonish well.
This film is remembered for its powerhouse performances from the late Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christina Ricci and Christopher Lloyd. The story follows the Addams Family as a conman infiltrates their house, posing as patriarch Gomez Addams’ long-lost brother Fester. The film walks the line between dark, sexy, goofy and silly. The New York Times said of the movie in 1991, “Making his directorial debut, the excellent cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld … gives the film a visual wit to match its screenplay's ghoulish gags.” The film is currently streaming on Netflix, AMC+ and Paramount+.
21. Best In Show (2000)
There aren’t many true auteur comedy filmmakers, but Christopher Guest is one of them. His movies have a definite style with their often mockumentary approach, purposeful awkwardness, familiar casts, and notably improvisational style. Improv is hard to pull off, but Best In Show does it well.
Best In Show follows five dogs and their people competing in a Philadelphia dog show. The ensemble cast includes Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge and many others. Best In Show is currently available for purchase to stream on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV and YouTube.
20. Singing In The Rain (1952)
Musical comedies sometimes aren’t regarded as “real comedies” as they have to walk the line between two genres. However, Gene Kelly and Stanely Donen’s Singing In The Rain excels at both. The movie stars Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds and follows actors as Hollywood moved from silent films to “talkies.”
The AFI ranked the movie highly on its list of best films. O’Connor received a Golden Globe for his work on the film, and the film received a WGA award as well. The movie fulfills on the promise to “make ‘em laugh” but also features breathtaking dance sequences from Kelley and Cyd Charisse. It is currently streaming on Max.
19. The Birdcage (1996)
The Birdcage both feels dated and extremely timely. Based on the French film and play, La Cage Aux Folles, The Birdcage stars Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as gay parents who own a South Beach Drag club. They are forced to play it straight when William’s son brings home the daughter of a far-right senator.
The film broke boundaries when it came to gay representation but, unfortunately, features a prominent character in brownface. Hank Azaria plays a gay Guatemalan housemaid. While Azaria has apologized for other instances of brownface, including voicing Apu on The Simpsons after the release of the documentary The Problem with Apu, he has not reflected on his role in The Birdcage. While the film isn’t perfect, The Birdcage shows not only queer parenting but the importance of standing up to right-wing politics to the queer community, making it important in the history of queer cinema. It is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
18. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is more than just quotable; it has been part of several generations’ teen experiences. And that makes sense because "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Director John Hughes captures something magic in the idealized day off.
The film follows the titular Ferris (Matthew Brodrick), his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) and his girlfriend, Sloane (Mia Sara), as they skip school to explore Chicago. The film sits at a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and is currently available for streaming through a subscription to Paramount+ or on Pluto TV.
17. Polyester (1981)
There are dirty comedies, and then there are John Waters movies. While some of his more well-known films have a weight to them, Polyester is lighter and more comedic. Longtime collaborator Divine shines as a housewife with a great sense of smell and an unfaithful husband. She is then wooed by Tab Hunter’s Todd Tomorrow.
Polyester oscillates between goofy, melodramatic and disgusting. The film was released in “Odorama,” a scratch-and-sniff card that encouraged moviegoers to smell ten odors from the movie. It was intentionally ridiculous and fed into the pulp nature of the film. While reminiscent of the 1960s Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama, Odorama encouraged moviegoers to smell things like dirty shoes and skunk. The film is currently on Amazon Prime, though you will have to find a special screening to get your hands on an Odorama card.
16. Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
Napoleon Dynamite is hard to describe, but it took America by storm upon its release. While it garnered mixed to even poor reviews, such as 1.5 stars from Ebert, it persisted as a cultural phenomenon. It has even been chosen to be rescreened at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
The film, directed by Jared Hess and starring John Heder, tells a coming-of-age story of an awkward teenager in small-town Idaho. The film was made on a shoestring budget and without many established actors, but that is part of the charm of Napoleon Dynamite. The film has almost a cinema verité quality as it captures the realness of teenage life. Napoleon Dynamite is currently streaming on Max.
15. How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
This screwball comedy stars Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall as O.G. gold diggers. The performances in How to Marry a Millionaire are what really cement it as a classic. Monroe shows off the sharpness in her comedy and persona, while Bacall balances raw sex appeal and comic timing.
While How to Marry a Millionaire is late for a screwball comedy as a genre, it still isn’t afraid to relish in some of its zanier moments, like how Monroe blindly stumbles as she refuses to wear her glasses because “men are not attentive to girls who wear glasses.” It is available to rent through YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Google Play.
14. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
While many movies attempt the difficult “tragicomedy” genre, Little Miss Sunshine excels in it. The film follows an impoverished, dysfunctional family as they road trip to a children’s beauty pageant with their young daughter.
Little Miss Sunshine features iconic performances from all of its principal cast: Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin and Alan Arkin. The film premiered at Sundance and started a small distribution bidding war. It went on to be nominated for 4 Academy Awards (and won 2.) The film holds a 91% amongst audiences and critics on Rotten Tomatoes and is currently streaming on Hulu.
13. Clueless (1995)
Teen comedies sometimes get a bad rap. However, some names stand out in the genre of teen comedies based on classic literature: 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man and, of course, Clueless.
Loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma, Clueless is endlessly quotable from “As if.” to “You’re a virgin who can’t drive.” to “Oh my god. I am totally bugging.” The movie, directed by Amy Heckerling, stars Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy and Paul Rudd. In 1995, The Washington Post praised the film for the “precision of its observations and sharpness of its one-liners.” And over 20 years later, it still packs the same punch. It is currently available to stream on Paramount+ or on Pluto TV.
12. It Happened One Night (1934)
Few comedies have won Best Picture, and It Happened One Night did much more than that. The film was the first to win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Directed by Frank Capra and starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, It Happened One Night is a pure old Hollywood classic.
The story follows a newspaperman as he tries to help a young heiress connect with her scheming fiance. Yes, the plot feels very 1930s at times, but the influence of this film on the modern rom-com is undeniable. You can almost see tropes develop in real time watching it. While the enemies-to-lovers trope can be seen everywhere, from Pride and Prejudice to a Hallmark Christmas movie, It Happened One Night gets it right and pairs it with snappy writing that holds up 90 years later. The film is currently available for free on YouTube and is a must-watch for any rom-com lover. It is currently streaming for free on YouTube and Tubi.
11. This is Spinal Tap (1984)
Rob Reiner’s directorial debut, This is Spinal Tap, really goes up to 11. This rock mockumentary has a huge cult following and for a good reason. The Criterion Collection has called it in “the ranks of the greatest comedies ever made.” The film stars Christopher Guest and Michael McKean as aging rockers on their American comeback tour.
Part of what makes This is Spinal Tap great is the music. The parody songs in this movie are both funny and earworms. The New York Times said, “There's an in-joke quality to the film, one that will make it all the more hilarious to anyone at all knowledgeable about either the esthetic or the business aspects of pop music. However, you need not have heard a band like Spinal Tap to find its story highly amusing.” It is available to rent on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play and Apple TV.
10 Best Comedies Of All Time
The top ten movies on this list aren’t only great comedies. They are films that have influenced the genre. Even people who have never seen these films know a joke from them or have seen a movie that takes direct inspiration from them.
Ranking these movies comes down to splitting hairs. They all deliver laughs, contain iconic lines and scenes, and, maybe more importantly, are endlessly rewatchable. These films feel not only witty but often inventive. While later movies have ripped off these films, they still feel fresh, often many years later (the oldest in this section is from 1941.)
10. Bridesmaids (2011)
It’s rare that self-professed chick flicks get nominated for the Oscars. Bridesmaids earned two nominations for Best Supporting Actress Melissa McCarthy and Best Original Screenplay for Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo. Directed by Paul Feig, Bridesmaids boasts several comedy powerhouse performances from Wiig, McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Jon Hamm and Wendi McLendon-Covey.
The film follows Wiig’s Annie as she becomes the maid of honor for Rudolph’s Lillian. Bridesmaids certainly wasn’t the first all-female lead comedy. Still, it has been noted as an important film in the genre of female-lead mainstream comedies, which some have called “the Bridesmaids effect.” Outside of its influence, it's just a hilarious movie from “Help me, I’m poor” to “I did slightly overcommit to the whole dog thing.” The movie is currently streaming on Peacock.
9. Office Space (1999)
Before The Office became a millennial favorite, there was Office Space. Directed by Mike Judge and starring Ron Livingston and Jennifer Aniston, Office Space walks the line between cult comedy and cultural juggernaut.
The film captures the humdrum of 90s office life while still being hilariously wacky as a group of underappreciated office workers try to take down their greedy boss. Ebert said of the film, "’Office Space’ is a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life. It has many of the same complaints as ‘Dilbert’ and the movie ‘Clockwatchers’ and, for that matter, the works of Kafka and the Book of Job.” Office Space is currently available to stream on Max.
8. Airplane! (1980)
Airplane! is one of those movies that everyone has surely heard a quote from … “and don't call me Shirley.” Starring Leslie Nielson, this farce parodies the disaster film, specifically Zero Hour (1953).
The film earned the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Comedy and nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and for the BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay. While not all parts of the movie have aged well, especially regarding race, it’s still remembered as a comedy classic for its goofy approach to parody. It is currently streaming on Showtime.
7. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
This 1941 Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake comedy is often called a “masterpiece.” It has been added to the Library of Congress, with the review, “Preston Sturges’s ‘Sullivan’s Travels’ remains one of the great American film satires of Hollywood.”
The titular Sullivan is a Hollywood director known for light comedies. He decides it's time to make something more important and ventures out into the real world, looking for inspiration for his film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” a film about suffering. While the film has a definite heart and message, dialogue and jokes come fast in this movie. Sullivan’s Travels is a must-watch for classic movie and comedy fans alike. It is available to rent on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play and Apple TV.
6. Coming to America (1988)
“But where in New York can one find a woman with grace, elegance, taste and culture? A woman suitable for a king … Queens.” Coming to America is full of iconic lines. Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall and James Earl Jones shine in this classic directed by John Landis.
Coming To America captures something real about the 1980s, Queens and the immigrant experience while still being a wacky comedy about an African prince coming to New York to find a wife. While many reviews weren’t glowing in 1988, Coming To America has remained popular, even prompting a sequel, Coming 2 America, in 2021. It is available to rent on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play and Apple TV.
5. The Jerk (1979)
The Jerk is directed by Carl Reiner and is Steve Martin’s first starring role. While not every joke has stood the test of time, The Jerk still delivers solid laughs over 40 years later, often thanks to Martin’s impeccable comedic timing.
The Jerk follows Martin’s character Navin through his rise to riches, and his subsequent fall. While the film is often crass and possibly even dumb on purpose, many jokes have a wit and elevation that balances the comedy. The film is often found on lists of best comedies and was even a favorite of director Stanley Kubrick. It is currently available to stream on Netflix.
4. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the second film by the iconic British comedy troupe Monty Python. This movie is so quotable that it has almost transcended the original script to seep into the collective consciousness. Who doesn’t say to themselves, “Tis but a scratch” occasionally?
This movie stars Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin and is a parody of Arthurian times. The film follows Chappan’s King Arthur as he and his squire search for the Holy Grail. While it received mixed reviews on its initial release, its cult following and memory are impressive. A musical based on the film, Spamalot, was adapted for the stage in 2005 and was revived for Broadway in 2023. Currently, the movie is available to stream on Netflix.
3. Friday (1995)
Not much happens in the movie Friday, but it doesn’t matter. The film still packs in the laughs. F. Gary Gray directs with iconic performances from Ice Cube and Chris Tucker. This movie is endlessly quotable from “Damnnnn!” to “Bye Felicia.” and has reached almost a meme status through reaction gifs.
Friday inspired two sequels: Next Friday and Friday After Next. All three movies have garnered cult status. However, Friday was both commercially successful and praised in 1995. The film had a modest budget, a music video director, one lead who had never done a comedy and only 20 days to shoot, but against it all, the film is remembered as a comedy classic. It is currently available on Max and Tubi.
2. Dr Strangelove (1964)
Dr Strangelove is maybe the darkest comedy on this list, but when you are making a satire featuring nazi scientists and nuclear annihilation, that tends to happen. This film was directed by Stanely Kubrick and stars Peter Sellers in three roles: a British officer, the American President, and the titular doctor, a former nazi and nuclear war expert.
The film follows a situation where an American general plans to drop a nuclear bomb on the Soviet Union. We promise it’s funnier than it sounds. The film is a frequent addition not only to best comedy lists but also to film lists in general, including AFI’s Best American Films list. It is currently free to watch on YouTube.
1. Young Frankenstein (1974)
No list of best comedies is complete without Mel Brooks. If this list had more space, it could have easily included several Brooks films, including Blazing Saddles, History of the World Part 1., and The Producers. There is a reason why so many of his movies have become comedy classics.
Young Frankenstein mixes comedy, horror and parody perfectly. The film features iconic performances, especially from Gene Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay with Brooks. The movie parodies the story of Frankenstein but does it with both zaniness and wit. Young Frankenstein currently boasts a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is currently available to stream through a DirecTV subscription.
Bottom Line
Comedy is subjective, but genuinely great comedies can connect to broad audiences and remain funny watch after watch, year after year. From modern classics to familiar faves, you can’t go wrong with the comedies on this list. | |||||
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Film legends Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, playing the roles of John and Ella Spencer, are off on a road trip from Massachusetts to Florida in their RV. They've been together more than 50 years. Ella has stopped treatments for cancer and John has Alzheimer's disease.
Their illnesses are evident as they make one last adventure together, running away from their doctors and their kids and stopping at roadside tourist attractions and diners.
"My John is charming, educated," says Ella one night in an RV park, dealing with her confused husband. "You stole him from me and I want you to give him back."
John reaches for her hand and answers, "Whoever stole him from you, stole him from me, too." The film reflects their love and determination as they face end-of-life changes.
The Father (2020)
Octogenarian actor Anthony Hopkins plays the role of Anthony, a man increasingly frustrated by his dementia as he seeks to maintain an independent life in the 2020 film "The Father," directed by Florian Zeller.
His daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) moves to London to assist with his care. As the film evolves, though, it becomes clear that there are many aspects of his life that Anthony misperceives, and the audience experiences this confusion along with him.
"The Father" captures both Anthony's pain at losing his sense of self through the lens of a blurred reality, and the sorrow of those who love him.
For his work, Hopkins won awards for the leading actor role from both the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Academy Awards in the United States. The film has been used to educate medical students about dementia.
What They Had (2018)
Actor Blythe Danner, playing the role of Ruth, first wanders off into the snow in the 2018 film "What They Had."
It's what leads her daughter Bridget, played by Hilary Swank, to return home to Chicago to help care for Ruth as Alzheimer's disease claims her memory and independence.
The film, directed by Elizabeth Chomko, pays special attention to the impact on caregivers of those with dementia.
"What They Had" was well-received by the AARP and other advocates of aging, and received recognition from several film festivals and awards programs, including a Humanitas nomination.
Remember (2015)
The late Christopher Plummer starred in "Remember" as a man who survived the Holocaust at Auschwitz. But, in his twilight years in New York City, he realizes that dementia will prevent him from finishing a mission to avenge the World War II deaths of his family.
So he begins his quest to kill the man rumored to be responsible.
The 2015 film from director Atom Egoyan is a thriller rather than a "feel good" film. Yet that's partly why the film succeeds at capturing the complexity of Zev Guttman, whose mission is often as unclear as his thoughts.
Elizabeth is Missing (2019)
Glenda Jackson stars as Maud, a woman living with dementia, in the 2019 film "Elizabeth Is Missing" from film director Aisling Walsh. It aired on BBC One in the United Kingdom rather than as a box office release.
It snagged numerous awards and nominations, including a 2020 International Emmy Award for Jackson and another leading actress award from BAFTA. The film follows Maud's journey as she tries to understand a mystery about her missing friend, and how the mists of memory about a long-lost sister shape her experience.
People in the United States can catch "Elizabeth Is Missing" on PBS Masterpiece.
Still Alice (2014)
In this American movie based on Lisa Genova's 2007 bestselling book of the same name, Julianne Moore stars as Alice Howland, a professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, which affects people younger than 65 years old.
Her husband is played by Alec Baldwin, and her children are played by Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, and Hunter Parrish.
While some critics found the movie powerful—especially since it's told by Alice herself—others criticized the movie for holding back when it came to how this familial type of Alzheimer's may have affected Alice's children.
Away From Her (2007)
In "Away From Her," Julie Christie was Oscar-nominated for Best Actress for her portrayal of Fiona, a woman with Alzheimer's who voluntarily enters a long-term care facility to avoid being a burden on Grant, her husband of 50 years.
After a 30-day separation recommended by the facility, Grant visits Fiona and finds that her memory of him has deteriorated and that she's developed a close friendship with another man in the facility.
Grant must draw upon the pure love and respect he has for Fiona to choose what will ensure his wife's happiness.
Christie won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Drama) for her performance in this movie. It's among the films studied for their depiction of dementia diseases.
Lovely, Still (2008)
This 2008 romantic comedy-drama was directed by Nik Fackler and stars Martin Landau, Ellen Burstyn, Adam Scott, and Elizabeth Banks.
It tells the story of a lonesome older man named Robert (Landau) who is surprised to be asked on a date by his new neighbor, Mary (Burstyn).
The film takes place leading up to the Christmas season and goes through the couples blooming romance. However, it soon becomes clear that Robert is struggling.
Eventually, we find out that he has Alzheimer's, and we see a portrayal of "the long goodbye" that many loved ones of people living with the condition experience.
Aurora Borealis (2005)
Critics considered this movie a well-crafted independent film that was released under the radar.
Stars Donald Sutherland (again) and Louise Fletcher steal the show—Sutherland plays a grandfather with dementia who requires more care than his wife (Fletcher) can take on.
They get help from their grandson (Joshua Jackson) and a home health aide (Juliette Lewis). The two forge a friendship as Sutherland's character (who insists he can see the Northern Lights from his window) becomes increasingly impaired by the condition.
Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (2001)
Based on the book "Elegy for Iris" by John Bayley, this movie tells the true story of English novelist Iris Murdoch developing Alzheimer's and the unconditional love of Bayley, her partner of 40 years.
Jim Broadbent won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Bayley in his later years.
Judi Dench and Kate Winslet were nominated for Academy Awards and Golden Globes (Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively) for their portrayals of Murdoch at different points in her life.
Age Old Friends (1989)
In this classic film, Hume Cronyn gave a great performance as John Cooper, who chose to live in a retirement home instead of with his daughter (played by Cronyn's real-life daughter Tandy Cronyn), as a symbol of maintaining his independence.
While there, John befriends Michael (Vincent Gardenia), who starts showing signs of dementia. When John's daughter extends an offer to live with her again, he must decide between leaving the rigid structure of the retirement home and staying to help his friend cope. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 30 | https://www.vulture.com/article/50-best-western-movies-ever.html | en | The 50 Greatest Western Movies Ever Made | [
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America can only claim a few art forms as its own. Jazz, for sure. Comic books, certainly. It’s probably safe to add the Western to that list, too, even if — like jazz and comics — the Western has roots around the globe and has since been adopted in many lands.
The history of movie Westerns more or less begins with the end of the Old West itself. Westerns thrived in the silent era, and though the genre’s popularity has ebbed and flowed ever since — largely fading from view in the ’80s but enjoy several resurgences in succeeding decades — it’s never threatened to fade away. The Western is a vital genre with the habit of reinventing itself every few years that doubles as a way to talk about America’s history while reflecting on its present. A strand of violent, psychologically complex Westerns that appeared in the 1950s, for example, captures both changing attitudes toward the settlement of the West and the treatment of Native Americans while channeling the spirit of a country still recovering from a devastating World War. And while there are certain themes and elements that define the genre, it’s also proven to be flexible, capable of playing host to many different stories and an infinite variety of characters. In Paul Greengrass’s film News of the World, for instance, Tom Hanks plays a traveling newsreader whose attempt to return a girl to her family doubles as a tour of a country whose divisions look like clear roots to some of our current national troubles.
This list of the 50 greatest Westerns reflects that wide legacy from the very first entry, a film directed by a Hungarian and starring a Tasmanian. It’s been assembled, however, working from a fairly traditional definition of the Western: films set along the America frontier of the 19th and the first years of the 20th century. That means no modern Westerns, no stealth Westerns starring aged X-Men, and no space Westerns with blasters instead of pistols. (We did, however, make an exception for a certain comedy that concludes with its stars attending its own premiere.)
That, of course, still leaves a lot of great Westerns. More, of course, than could possibly fit on a top-50 list interested in capturing the full scope of the genre. As such, not every John Ford film made the list. Anthony Mann and James Stewart made eight Westerns together. Any of them could have been included, but not all of them have been. This list is designed to double as a guide to the genre’s many different forms in the hopes it will send readers to corners they might not know and reconsider some classics they might not have seen before.
So with all that said, let’s kick it off with a trip to an especially rowdy Old Western town.
50.
Dodge City (1939)
Some of the greatest Westerns ever made tweak the genre’s traditions and expectations — traditions and expectations created by countless films that like their good guys to wear white hats, their bad guys to be instantly identifiable villains, their saloons to play host to barroom brawls, and their climactic shoot-outs to be rousing. Dodge City has no interest in subverting any of that. Directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland — a team that had recently enjoyed great success with films like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood — the film wants nothing more than to be a traditional Western on the grandest scale imaginable. Flynn plays a man compelled to clean up the lawless cattle town of Dodge City. De Havilland plays the woman who loves him (eventually), and Bruce Cabot plays a lawless tough guy. The rest, as the saying goes, writes itself, but the film’s so entertaining that the familiarity of it all doesn’t matter. Flynn and de Havilland transport the chemistry of their swashbuckling adventures to the Old West, while Curtiz makes brilliant use of Technicolor and a big budget. Anyone new to the Western or just wanting to see a Hollywood Western in its most basic form executed at the highest possible level should start here. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
49.
The Sisters Brothers (2018)
At the other end of the spectrum lies what back in the ’60s used to be called “the revisionist Western,” though its influence has so permeated the genre that it’s hard to tell where traditionalism ends and revisionism begins. Put simply, the revisionist Western steers away from, or plays against, formula, refusing to romanticize the Old West or depict it as a place with clear good guys and bad guys. It also tends to emphasize the grimier, more unpleasant aspects of life in the American West. One litmus test: If you see flies buzzing around a corpse, you’re probably watching a revisionist Western.
There’s grime aplenty, but also unexpected sweetness, in The Sisters Brothers, in which John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play brothers who work as hired assassins, despite being temperamentally unsuited for the job. Hired by a rich man to take out an inventor named Warm (Riz Ahmed), they run into mission drift as they get to know both their target and the other man tracking him down, a private detective named Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal). Adapted by Jacques Audiard from a novel by Patrick deWitt, the film didn’t find much of an audience when it played in theaters. But it’s a cult classic waiting to happen, a cockeyed look at a time and place in America when the rules hadn’t yet hardened and seemingly anything could happen — for good and for ill. It also features a breathtaking ending that’s unlike anything another Western has dared. (Available to stream on Pluto TV, Tubi, and Plex.)
48.
Buck and the Preacher (1972)
Watch enough classic Westerns and it’s easy to conclude — leaving out a few exceptions — that African-Americans rarely had a role to play in the Old West, or at best kept to the margins of the stories that defined it. That doesn’t square with history, and Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut shines a light on just one underrepresented Old West story via the tale of some Black migrants fleeing the brutality of Reconstruction life to find a new life in unsettled territory — only to find that prejudice and other perils await them on their journey. Poitier stars as Buck, a former soldier who escorts wagon trains for pay but comes to find he has a deeper stake in the well being of those he protects. A virtually unrecognizable Harry Belafonte co-stars as Preacher, a scraggly, traveling man of God/con man who, eventually, throws in with Buck. Joined by Ruby Dee, they make a fun buddy team. Their chemistry provides a light counterbalance to the film’s exploration of the complicated racial dynamics that defined the West, including the party’s tense arrangement with the Native Americans who never let the migrants forget they’re only visitors as they pass through their territory. (Available to stream on Prime Video and Tubi.)
47.
Day of Anger (1967)
The Western genre got a shot of new ideas starting in the early ’60s thanks to the proliferation of European Westerns, many of them made by Italian directors using stretches of Italy and Spain that mostly looked like the Old West — not to mention a mix of American and European stars. The master of what would come to be known as Spaghetti Westerns was Sergio Leone, whose breakthrough film, 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars, made a movie star out of a TV actor named Clint Eastwood and helped spark a boom that would lead to hundreds of such films in the decades that follow. (More on Leone, Eastwood, and A Fistful of Dollars below.) With their askew takes on the American mythos, twisted characters, inventive scores, vivid imagery, and florid violence, the Spaghetti Western developed into a rich subgenre that could easily fill a top 50 list of its own, one that rewards those who venture away from Leone. One example: Day of Anger, directed by Leone’s former assistant director Tonino Valerii. Giuliano Gemma stars as Scott, a lowly street sweeper whose status starts to change when Frank Talby (Lee Van Cleef, an American actor whose career got a second act thanks to Spaghetti Westerns) takes him under his wing. But he soon learns that there’s a price to be paid by those who would use a gun to move up in the world. Clearly inspired by Leone — they’d work together again on the fun My Name Is Nobody in 1973 — Valerii mixes cutting black humor with scenes of violence, blending enthrall with revulsion as we see what it means to make one’s reputation by shedding blood. (Available to stream on Plex and Tubi).
46.
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Consider this: When Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery, using New Jersey as a stand-in for the American frontier, the Old West wasn’t even that old. Most historians use 1912, when Arizona and New Mexico became states, as the closing of the frontier. But, as with the dime novels that made heroes and legends out of its inhabitants, the West was already passing into myth when Porter made this violent, crisply edited film in which bandits meet a bad end after robbing a telegraph office (but not before thrilling audiences with their daring and ruthlessness, like so many heroes and villains to follow them). The final shot, in which the lead bandit takes aim at the audience, is its own kind of wonder, implicating viewers in both the threat and the thrill of what they’d just seen. (Available to stream on YouTube.)
45.
Broken Arrow (1950)
If the Western genre has an original sin, it’s the portrayal of Native Americans, treated by many films alternately as buffoons and subhuman savages. The demeaning depictions have ties to some of the ugliest chapters in American history. And just as the country at large is still reckoning with the consequences of its conquest of the West, the Western genre will always have to grapple with its most thoughtless and hateful portrayals. Some films tried to offer correctives, though they usually weren’t without their own sorts of awkwardness. Directed by Delmer Daves, Broken Arrow loses points for casting white actors in most of its Native American roles, a once-common practice that now seems baffling. But it scores points for weaving a message of tolerance into an effective, fact-inspired adventure story in which James Stewart plays Tom Jeffords, an ex-Army scout who befriends the Apache chief Cochise (Jeff Chandler) and works to defuse tensions in the area. The film both helped nudge the Western’s depiction of Native Americans in a more sympathetic direction (though not every film responded to that nudge) and — with Winchester ’73, released the same year — helped confirm Stewart as one of the key stars of the new decade, thus bringing about a more complex, conflicted sort of Western hero. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
44.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Marlon Brando only directed one movie and it didn’t exactly do his career any favors. He went over schedule, and over budget with One-Eyed Jacks, which premiered to mixed reviews and commercial indifference. The release of a restored print in 2016 — shepherded by admirers like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg — helped confirm what the film’s partisans had argued all along: Brando knew what he was doing behind the camera. Scorsese described it as “represent[ing] a sort of bridge between two eras in moviemaking: the production values of old Hollywood and the emotional values of the new Hollywood,” an apt summation of a classic-looking Western anchored by Brando’s tortured performance as Rio, an outlaw determined to exact revenge on an older partner he calls Dad (Karl Malden) who’s gone straight and become a lawman — a plan made all the more complicated when Rio falls for Dad’s stepdaughter (Pina Pellicer). The production was dogged by stories of Brando wasting time waiting for just the right waves to appear for a shot, but the film itself bears out his instincts. Sometimes you just have to wait for the right wave to suggest the roiling emotions of a bad guy trying to decide if he wants to follow his instincts to their violent ends. (Available to stream on Pluto TV, Tubi, and Plex.)
43.
Little Big Man (1970)
Few revisionist Westerns took the task of demythologizing the West as literally as Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, which is narrated by the 121-year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman, under extremely impressive aging makeup) who tries to set the record straight by telling a historian what really happened in the Old West. Crabb has an unusual perspective. A white kid raised by the Cheyenne, he bounces back and forth between the white and Native American worlds over the course of the film, finding abundance of absurdity on both sides but an overabundance of hypocrisy and cruelty on only one. Penn balances comedy against tragedy, depicting Crabb bungling his way through stints as a gunslinger and a soldier then refusing to look away from the massacres he witnesses, scenes Penn fills with echoes of the Vietnam War. Even those who remember the past sometimes live long enough to see it repeated. (Available to stream on Prime Video.)
42.
The Left Handed Gun (1958)
Speaking of Penn, years before he made Bonnie and Clyde sympathetic outlaws, he did much the same for Billy the Kid with The Left Handed Gun. As played by Paul Newman, William Bonney is a trigger-happy hothead who’s more misunderstood than evil. Taken in by a cattle boss, he becomes enraged when a competing bunch of cattlemen kill his mentor. The anger ultimately leads to his downfall, but not before he starts to see his own short life start to become legend. Working from a take on Bonney originated by Gore Vidal, Penn and Newman treat him as a rebel with an overdeveloped sense of justice and underdeveloped impulse control. It serves as a showcase for a complex, twitchy performance for Newman, who was just coming into his own as a major movie star, and for Penn, whose directorial debut captures a director ready to question received American myths from the start. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
41.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
A similar impulse drives Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but rather than fill the film with restless energy, as Penn did, Dominik opts for a more meditative approach. Brad Pitt plays James opposite Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, an admirer and gang recruit who ultimately turns against his idol. Aided by stunning Roger Deakins cinematography and an entrancing score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Dominik’s film locks into the rhythms of another time, letting sharp moments of violence interrupt long, slow passages that wouldn’t be out of place in a film by Terrence Malick (one of Dominick’s obvious reference points). The film had a difficult journey to theaters where it drew only small but devoted audiences, yet even then it seemed destined to be regarded as a classic unappreciated in its time. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
40.
The Shootist (1976)
John Wayne might not have known the end was near when he agreed to make The Shootist for Don Siegel, but he must have had his suspicions. Wayne, who died in 1979, had fought cancer since the early ’60s and had been finding it increasingly hard to work due to his physical limitations. The story of a gunfighter facing down death, The Shootist didn’t begin as an elegiac tribute to the star — a number of other, younger actors passed on the part — but it works beautifully as Wayne’s swan song, giving him a character who’s lived long enough to become a Western legend only to learn that that status has more detriments than benefits. Filled with familiar faces — James Stewart and John Carradine among them — and set in 1901, it also captures the passing of one era and the coming of another. Wayne’s character, J.B. Books, becomes the idol of a teenage boy named Gillom (Ron Howard), but the film’s ultimately about how the sort of life Books lived has no place in the world that’s coming. Nor did Wayne, but Siegel’s film gives him a fitting good-bye. (Available to stream on Showtime.)
39.
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Filled with deep knowledge of and affection for the classic Western, and a willingness to blow raspberries at it anyway, Blazing Saddles finds Mel Brooks (and a writing team that included Richard Pryor and Andrew Bergman) deploying every sort of gag known to comedy, from dark, anachronistic asides (“I must’ve killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille”) to a concerto of bean-assisted farts. But it might just have been a fun romp were it not for the social commentary central to the story of Bart (Cleavon Little), a black man sent by the corrupt Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) to stir up trouble in the town of Rock Ridge so it can be demolished to make way for a railroad line. It’s silliness with a purpose, and the film weaves the jokes and the pointed jabs together brilliantly. Brooks directs with an understanding of how classic Westerns work, but the film is driven by a need to tell the sort of story they never could. (Available to stream on Paramount+.)
38.
The Tall T (1957)
Between 1956 and 1960 director Budd Boetticher, writers Burt Kennedy and Charles Lang, and star Randolph Scott teamed up for six films that came to be known as the Ranown Cycle — tough, tight, morally complex stories of the Old West and the difficulties of being a person of conscience while living within it. All beautifully crafted and carefully considered, any of them would make a fine addition to this list (and there’s one more a little further up the line). Adapted from a story by Elmore Leonard, The Tall T casts Scott as a down-on-his-luck cowboy who ends up in the middle of a scheme to ransom a wealthy woman (Maureen O’Hara) newly wed to a coward. Boetticher keeps the suspense high in a film deeply interested in what it means to be an honorable man under impossible circumstances, a struggle Scott depicts less through words than actions and the emotions he feels but never expresses. (Available to stream on Plex, Starz, and Tubi.)
37.
Django (1966)
Undoubtedly the most influential Spaghetti Western not directed by Sergio Leone, Django takes the ugliness and violence of Leone’s films up several notches for a story that pits an ex-Union soldier named Django (Franco Nero) against the Klan and other foes. Sergio Corbucci — who also contributed memorable entries like Navajo Joe and The Great Silence to the Spaghetti canon — directs like Leone without the lyricism, putting the emphasis squarely on violence and absurdity. But his approach, and Nero’s performance, serve the lean, mean, bloody story well. The film has one official sequel but dozens of unofficial follow-ups with titles like Django, Prepare a Coffin and A Few Dollars for Django. It also has even more imitators who found varying degrees of success by combining a mysterious hero with ever-escalating violence. The original, however, remains a dark delight. (Available to stream on Peacock and Pluto TV. )
36.
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
The ’50s and ’60s found international filmmakers engaging in a fascinating cultural exchange. For his 1954 classic Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa looked to the American Western — especially the films of John Ford — for inspiration. The American Western repaid the tribute with this remake of Seven Samurai directed by John Sturges. Sturges’s film lacks some of the surprise and depth of Kurosawa’s film, but it’s as entertaining as big Hollywood Westerns get, putting Yul Brynner in charge of a mismatched band of gunfighters (whose ranks include Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn) as they defend a Mexican village plagued by bandits under the command of a sadistic leader played by Eli Wallach. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
35.
Bend of the River (1952)
The West held the promise of reinvention, serving as a place where those who wanted to start a new chapter in their lives could forget the past. But does a fresh start always change the contents of a person’s heart? That’s the question at the center of this Anthony Mann Western in which James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy both play former border raiders who, in the years after the Civil War, have started to create new lives for themselves on the frontier. For Stewart’s character, that means helping a wagon train find its way to Oregon. For Kennedy’s that maybe means the same thing. But maybe not. Mann’s film explores what it takes to redeem the bad actions of the past while depicting the corrupting influence of wealth, watching as the discovery of gold turns almost everyone into monsters and the Edenic Oregon Territory into a land ruled by greed. It’s a complex, gripping drama that’s unafraid to send some likable characters down dark paths, and it all plays out against stunning Pacific Northwest scenery (some less-convincing-than-usual soundstage sequences aside). (Not currently available on streaming.)
34.
A Bullet for the General (1966)
The Spaghetti Western’s offshoots include the Zapata Western, which set stories against the background of the Mexican Revolution. This often provided filmmakers the chance to offer coded (and sometimes not so coded) commentary on the politics of the 1960s. Among the first of its type, Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General mixes rousing action with a story of betrayal and political assassination that ends with an unambiguous call for the underclass to take up arms. Unsurprisingly, its screenwriting team includes Franco Solinas, the Marxist co-writer of The Battle of Algiers, but Damiani effectively folds the film’s political agenda into an exciting narrative filled with memorable action scenes that exemplifies how popular entertainment can often be the best way to deliver a message. (Available to stream on Plex and Tubi.)
33.
Vera Cruz (1954)
Spaghetti Westerns didn’t come out of nowhere. Their precursors include this Robert Aldrich film, in which a financially struggling plantation owner named Ben (Gary Cooper) seeks to bail himself out any way he can by seeking his fortune in Mexico. There he teams up with Joe (Burt Lancaster), the morally suspect leader of a band of outlaws (a band that includes Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson and others), to make off with a fortune in gold coins. Aldrich brings a surplus of visual flair to a sweat-soaked film in which Cooper’s character looks like a good guy only in contrast to the even worse guys around him. Cooper’s tight-lipped performance leaves Lancaster plenty of room to play the colorful rogue, a man who can keep up a charm offensive up to the moment he puts a bullet in your back. (Available to stream on MGM+, Pluto TV, and Tubi.)
32.
Ride the High Country (1962)
Budd Boetticher moved on from movie Westerns after Comanche Station in 1960, focusing instead on TV work and a documentary about matador Carlos Arruza. Randolph Scott, on the other hand, made one more Western, the 1962 film Ride the High Country. The first Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah, it plays a bit like the passing of the torch. Scott and Joel McCrea co-star as aging cowboys who take on the job of guarding a gold shipment. They’re men past their prime in a world that’s passing them by, and they know it, but they’re determined to make the most of their last ride. Peckinpah would soon make movies that would upend the Western genre with their balletic violence and dirt-caked vision of the West. Ride the High Country finds him exploring some of his pet themes — particularly the end of the West and what it means to be a man out of time — via a much more traditional style and using major stars of a not-quite-but-almost-bygone era. A lovely, quietly mournful film, it, too, would be one of the last of its kind. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
31.
The Shooting (1966)
Some films never fully give up their mysteries. The Shooting, one of two low-budget Westerns that Monte Hellman made back-to-back in Utah for an uncredited Roger Corman, is one such film. Working from a script by future Five Easy Pieces writer Carole Eastman (working under a pseudonym), Hellman turns the story of two gunslingers (Warren Oates and Will Hutchins) accompanying an unnamed woman (Millie Perkins) through an unforgiving desert while being trailed by a man in black (a menacing Jack Nicholson). Artful and at times almost abstract, it strips the Western down to its fundamental elements and then strips away some more as it builds to an ending as mysterious in its own way as the end of Don’t Look Now (or Hellman’s own Two-Lane Blacktop). For a long time, The Shooting seemed almost more like a rumor than a film. It never played theaters and aired just a few times on TV. But those who saw it kept its flame alive, and it’s rightfully received a second life thanks to home video. The film’s more conventional companion piece, Ride in the Whirlwind, also starring Nicholson and Perkins, is also very much worth a look. (Available to stream on Peacock, Prime Video, Max and Tubi.)
30.
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Clint Eastwood’s fifth film as a director has tangled origins. It began as a film by Philip Kaufman, who took on the job of adapting a book by a man who called himself Forrest Carter, who’d later write the memoir The Education of Little Tree recounting his upbringing in the Cherokee tradition. Kaufman lost his job while shooting the film and Carter would later be exposed as a fraud — a former member of the Klan and a speechwriter for George Wallace. Despite how it got started, The Outlaw Josey Wales ended up as very much a Clint Eastwood film, and a more mature consideration of the genre than he’d managed with its dark, violent, and deeply satisfying predecessor High Plains Drifter. Trading in a story of revenge for one of reconciliation, Eastwood stars as Josey Wales, a member of a pro-Confederate militia who heads West to escape a bounty on his head. Having lost his wife and child to pro-Union forces, he expects his journey to be a lonely one, only to pick up a kind of surrogate family that includes an aged Cherokee man (Chief Dan George), a mute Navajo woman, and others. Eastwood doesn’t skimp on the violence, but the film ultimately cares more about what happens after violence ends, and how a country patches itself together after a divisive war, a theme that resonated with mid-’70s America. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
29.
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
A tight, chilling cautionary tale about the dangers of mob mentality and rushed judgment, this William Wellman film stars Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan as cowboys who drift into a new town and find themselves drawn into a posse seeking justice for the murder of a rancher. They find some likely suspects, or at least suspects that seem likely enough to a bloodthirsty crowd. Always efficient, Wellman’s film is short and to the point, but it moves to deliberate rhythms, conveying the speed and urgency of the posse’s hunt but slowing down as their suspects endure the torture of knowing that their time on Earth may have reached an end. In a genre with no shortage of blazing guns and casual killing, The Ox-Bow Incident makes every death sting. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
28.
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
The middle entry in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy — we’ll be hitting the others a little further up the list — For a Few Dollars More sometimes gets overlooked, sandwiched as it is between the tight, revelatory breakthrough A Fistful of Dollars and the sweeping The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In many respects, it falls squarely between those two poles, but it’s also the most emotionally rich of the three. Eastwood returns, this time playing a bounty hunter who joins forces with a former Army colonel who keeps his reasons for seeking revenge to himself until the film’s finale, reasons that add a poignant undercurrent to a film that ups the violence and grunginess of its predecessor and sets up an even more ambitious follow-up. (Available to stream on Max.)
27.
Winchester ’73 (1950)
James Stewart didn’t have the easiest time returning to work after World War II. The charming comedic parts he’d specialized in before his time in the Air Force, an experience he had difficulty discussing, didn’t seem to suit him anymore, and his first film back, It’s a Wonderful Life, flopped even though it showcased a skill at playing troubled characters rarely glimpsed before. However, 1950 was a breakthrough year. He dazzled in Harvey, but it was a pair of Westerns that confirmed that he’d be a major force in the genre for years to come: Broken Arrow (see above) and this first pairing with Anthony Mann. Here Stewart plays Lin McAdam, the central figure in the story of a rare, coveted gun’s journey through the Old West, as it passes from Lin’s hands to that of an outlaw, a Native American (Rock Hudson), and others. It’s a clever device that allows Mann to explore several corners of the West and, in the process, tell a variety of stories while setting up both director and star as important voices in the genre. (Available to stream on Starz.)
26.
True Grit (2010)
John Wayne shook up his image with the 1969 film True Grit, an adaptation of a Charles Portis novel in which Wayne played the cantankerous, usually drunk U.S. Marshal “Rooster” Cogburn. It’s a fine film in its own right, but Joel and Ethan Coen’s second pass at the story is even better. Jeff Bridges takes on the Cogburn role, playing him as equal parts curmudgeon and hero as he helps the spirited, teenaged Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) track down the villain (James Brolin) who killed her father — with some help from a boastful Texas Ranger (Matt Damon). The results, which bring more of the novel’s eccentric touches to the screen, suggest Portis’s book was always meant to be a Coen brothers movie, creating a vision of the West as a weird, darkly comic place, one that requires an almost inhuman amount of dedication to bend it to its will. It gets points for keeping Portis’s bittersweet ending, too. (Available to stream on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.)
25.
The Power of the Dog (2021)
In an instantly infamous interview with Marc Maron, Sam Elliott likened the cowboys of The Power of the Dog to “those dancers, those guys in New York that wear bowties and not much else.” He meant Chippendales dancers, and though Elliott was generally wrong in his assessment of Jane Campion’s haunting, darkly funny adaptation of the 1967 Thomas Savage novel, he’s onto something by suggesting the film’s cowboys are playing a role. The brilliance of Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the sadistic, ultra-macho Phil Burbank is in Phil’s phoniness. He’s not a cowboy by birth, but — in attempting to live up to the cowboy ideal of his idol, the late Bronco Henry — he’s determined to live (and overplay) the part to the bitter end. In Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the effete stepson of Phil’s brother George’s (Jesse Plemons) new bride, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), he finds a target for his brutality: someone who’s not quite helpless as he appears against the backdrop of a Montana that’s reluctant to embrace the 20th century and say good-bye to the ways of the Old West. (Available to stream on Netflix.)
24.
The Gunfighter (1950)
“Well, there was this movie I seen one time about a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck,” Bob Dylan sings on his 1986 track “Brownsville Girl,” a song co-written by Sam Shepard. Then, without warning, he goes on to spoil the plot of this 1950 Henry King film, in which Peck plays a gunfighter whose prowess with a gun has made him a legend while putting a target on his back for any young gun hoping to make a name for himself. Dylan can’t quite remember the name of the movie, but it’s clearly made a deep impression on him anyway, no doubt in large part thanks to Peck’s haunted performance as a man for whom fame has become a trap and the reasons for that fame a source of shame that stands between him and the righteous, settled life he wants to live. It’s yet another 1950 Western that signaled a shift in the genre. Drawing on noir, it helped set the stage for a decade filled with haunted men shadowed by a past they can only dream of escaping. (Available to stream on Peacock and Tubi.)
23.
Dead Man (1995)
That same sense of fatalism hangs over every frame of Jim Jarmusch’s journey through an old, weird American West, which alternates between gritty revisionist sequences and increasingly surreal passages as it sends a Cleveland-born accountant named William Blake (Johnny Depp) on a journey toward death. Along the way he encounters everyone from a pitiless industrialist played by Robert Mitchum to a cross-dressing trader played by Iggy Pop — and, most importantly, a Native American man named Nobody (Gary Farmer) who guides him on his journey in part because he suspects Blake is the reincarnation of the poet who shares his name. A languorous Neil Young score sets the tone for a film in which Jarmusch uses starkly beautiful black-and-white images, dry humor, and Depp’s deadpan performance to create a dreamlike journey beyond the boundaries of Old West myths. (Available to stream on Max.)
22.
7 Men From Now (1956)
The first Budd Boetticher, Burt Kennedy, and Randolph Scott collaboration set the pattern for those that followed, and a high standard for them to match. Boetticher reportedly described their unifying feature as common setup: “Here comes Randy. He’s alone. What’s his problem?” Here Randy’s problem’s especially tough. Once the sheriff of Silver Springs, he now hunts for the seven men responsible for a robbery that left his wife dead, a pursuit that puts him in conflict with a tough character played by Lee Marvin and a young married couple whom he suspects might not survive their journey West without his help. Whether or not that’s his problem proves central to the plot, and more complicated than it first appears. The subsequent twists allow Boetticher and his collaborators to explore the complex matter of what it means to live justly in a dangerous world while still surviving to see the next day — a question they try to answer with this and the brisk, action-packed, but always reflective films that followed, rarely arriving at any easy answers. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
21.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
The film that made Clint Eastwood a movie star, revealed Sergio Leone as a peerless stylist, and inspired hundreds (thousands?) of imitators, this breakthrough Spaghetti Western offers a bloody, enthralling reinterpretation of the American Western as viewed from afar, with a plot on loan from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai hit Yojimbo. (The cultural exchange between Kurosawa and the Western didn’t end with The Magnificent Seven.) Eastwood plays the Man With No Name (though he’s known here as “Joe”), the character he’d spin variations on in the film’s two (loosely connected) follow-ups. A drifter and gifted gunslinger, he strolls into a town controlled by two warring factions and proceeds to play them against each other to his own benefit, saying as little as possible and letting them make assumptions about his plans. Though he ultimately takes a stand for good, the Man With No Name seems happily amoral for much of the film, less a white-hatted good guy than a disillusioned anti-hero with no interest in propping up a corrupt system or the men who run it. It’s no wonder the ’60s embraced him and Leone’s irreverent, thrilling take on the genre, one scored by Ennio Morricone’s equally groundbreaking music. (Available to stream on Max.)
20.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
Playing older than his years, John Wayne stars in the middle chapter of John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy (sandwiched between Fort Apache and Rio Grande) as a soon-to-retire captain whose final days in service find him reflecting on what it all meant as he tries to prevent a new outbreak of fighting in the days after Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn. Shooting in stunning Technicolor in his favorite location, Utah’s Monument Valley, Ford fills the film with lyrical passages while valorizing a soldier whose primary concern is preventing bloodshed rather than facilitating it. Short on plot but no less memorable for it, the film inspired critic Dave Kehr to call it “perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.” (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
19.
Shane (1953)
The fundamental conflict at the heart of the classic Western pits civilization against lawlessness and the notion that might makes right against order and justice. But not all those who fought to make the West safe for law-abiding citizens got to live in the world they helped shape. Characters who realize they have no place in the changing West float through many of the greatest Westerns (including a bunch further up, and atop, this list).
If there’s an archetypal version of that character, it’s Shane, the hero of George Stevens’s film of the same name. Played by Alan Ladd, Shane has a past he’d rather not talk about but sees the possibility of a better future in the Wyoming Territory, where settlers find themselves harassed by a land baron with no respect for their legal claims on the land. It’s there Shane befriends a local family (headed by Van Heflin and Jean Arthur) and tries to put his gunfighting ways behind him but is forced to call upon his old skills for the sake of his new friends and the life they’re trying to forge.
Stevens makes beautiful use of location photography while asking whether it will be a plough or a gun that defines the West in the years that come. A veteran of World War II, Stevens returned from the conflict determined never to make movies that glorified violence. Even while making Shane’s choices seem unavoidable, Ladd brings a tragic heaviness to his defense of the settlers and a sense that even necessary violence goes against what’s best in the human spirit. The final shot is one of the Western’s most famous images — and one of its saddest. (Available to stream on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.)
18.
3:10 to Yuma (1957)
A similar conflict between a desire to live a quiet, settled life and the need to do whatever it takes to survive plays out in Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma (the first adaptation of an Elmore Leonard story that inspired a strong remake in 2007). It even shares a cast member with Shane, Van Heflin, who plays Dan, a rancher who witnesses a stagecoach robbery but just wants to stay out of it. He’s desperate for money, however, and thus susceptible to the promise of a reward for helping ensure that Ben Wade (Glenn Ford, leering but charming) doesn’t escape before boarding a train that will take him to jail for his crimes. As they wait for the train, and the arrival of henchmen determined to set Wade free, the film explores the nature of justice and morality in an untamed land and the possibility of redemption for even the worst of men, all building to an explosive finale that takes some unexpected turns. (Available to stream on Prime Video.)
17.
High Noon (1952)
One of the most divisive of all the classic Westerns, High Noon inspired Howard Hawks to make Rio Bravo because he “didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help.” (You’ll find Hawks’s film a little higher on this list, but don’t take that as a slight to High Noon.) Others’ reasons for disliking it were more complicated, wrapped as they were in the politics of the day, which led screenwriter Carl Foreman to leave the country for Britain before its release, rightly assuming he’d soon be blacklisted for failing to cooperate with HUAC. That same political environment undoubtedly inspired the film, in which Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper), just as he’s about to retire, discovers that no one will help him against a gang of outlaws out for revenge. Letting the action unfold in something close to real time, director Fred Zinnemann builds the tension slowly, letting Kane’s mounting desperation, rather than gunfights and acts of heroism, push the film along. By the climax, it’s become a drama about a brave man — never mind Hawks’s reading — who learns just how cowardly everyone else can be when they have something to lose, and how quickly a nice town can revert back to savagery no matter how much work has been put into taming it. (Available to stream on MGM+, Paramount+, and Prime Video)
16.
Forty Guns (1957)
Director Samuel Fuller loved big emotions and shocking imagery. Forty Guns unites those passions, pitting a former gunslinger named Griff (Barry Sullivan) against a local landowner who holds power by controlling a cadre of men, the 40 guns of the title. It’s a classic Western setup complicated by the landowner being the commanding and beautiful Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), who inflames Griff’s passions and he hers. Fuller fills the film with heated drama and bold flourishes — like a dinner table where Jessica shares a meal with all 40 of her enforcers — as well as some deeply Freudian gun talk with a beautiful gunsmith, a tracking shot that seemingly runs the length of a town, and a showdown filled with extremely tightly close-ups. (Leone was doubtlessly taking notes.) It’s brash and satisfying on every level, from the action scenes to the complex, sexually charged central romance. (Available to stream on Plex and Tubi.)
15.
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Then again, when it comes to sexual chemistry and fluid gender roles, Forty Guns looks pretty tame compared to Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, released a few years earlier. Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon owner who dominates everyone she meets with her imperious attitude. (“I never met a woman who was more man,” her bartender says.) Well, almost everyone. The film puts Vienna up against Ward Bond’s John McIvers, but McIvers mostly seems to act as a cat’s-paw to Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), who hates and obsesses over Vienna. It’s all quite overheated even before the arrival of the eponymous Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), when director Nicholas Ray turns up the heat even further — almost literally in a fiery climax. The film confused audiences at the time, but it’s rightly emerged as one of Ray’s most daring attempts to push the boundaries of film drama via heightened emotions and brash visuals. In a 2008 appreciation, Roger Ebert dubbed it “one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western.” Ray discovered just how beautifully the two could fit together. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
14.
My Darling Clementine (1946)
Westerns tell some stories again and again, few as often as the confrontation between the Earps and the Clantons at Tombstone’s O.K. Corral. Though John Ford claimed to have based the fight on Earp’s account, an account Ford heard from Wyatt Earp himself, My Darling Clementine fudges a lot of the details in the interest of good storytelling. Starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, Ford regular Ward Bond as his brother Morgan, and Victor Mature as “Doc” Holliday, it’s very much a “print the legend” version of the Tombstone story, to borrow a phrase from a later Ford film.
But what a legend: In Ford’s hands, Earp’s story embodies the clash between order and chaos at the heart of the Western, a tale in which the courage of a few brave souls makes the West safe for civilization. Ford shapes it into a film filled with rousing sequences, but also lyrical asides and gentler moments that establish why the struggle matters. The title reveals a lot. Where other versions of the story bear names like Tombstone and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Ford’s emphasizes the character who symbolizes civility and the possibility of a better world to come, even if that world might have no place for men like Earp in it. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
13.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Some films were even more explicit about how changing times left some with nowhere left to call home. Released at the end of a tumultuous decade and deeply concerned with how eras end, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid brings a light touch to a story of a pair of outlaws who find themselves headed toward a dead end they didn’t see coming. Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) have grown accustomed to living well as renegades but find that the closing of the frontier and the arrival of powerful businessmen with the deep pockets to fight back against outlaws have limited their options. Directed by George Roy Hill from a script by William Goldman, it’s a film so charming — those stars help a lot — that its fatalism sneaks up on you. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
12.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The final entry in Leone’s Dollars trilogy takes everything that’s come before and makes it bigger, bolder, meaner, and even more breathtakingly exciting. Telling the story of three men — played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach — who alternately team up and betray each other in the hunt for a fortune, the film finds Leone seeing how far he can take his trademark aesthetic. Sometimes it plays like a pop-art Western, reducing the genre’s iconography to its splashiest imagery. Sometimes it plays like the Western as opera, building arias of violence and suspense with editing timed to the rhythms of Ennio Morricone’s score. It’s also ridiculously entertaining from start to finish, packing seemingly everything Leone ever wanted to do with the Western into one movie. Leone wasn’t quite done with the genre, however, as this list will attest. (Available to stream on Max.)
11.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
John Ford made all sorts of movies, but he kept circling back to the Western. Maybe that’s because he kept finding more to say with the genre, and finding more ways to express himself through it. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance feels like no other Ford film. A return to black-and-white photography on soundstages, it’s a more intimate, psychological drama than Ford’s other Westerns. The choice suits the material, a study in contrasts between two men trying to tame the West: Ranse Stoddard (James Stewart), an idealistic young lawyer, and Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a tough rancher. Both find themselves at odds with local cattle barons who hire the blackhearted gunfighter Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) to prevent Stoddard’s attempts to earn statehood for the unnamed Western territory that serves as the film’s setting. The film lets Ford pair two of the Western’s most iconic stars as they play their personas off one another while considering how the stories that shape our understanding of history get written, and who gets forgotten in the process. (Available to stream on MGM+, Paramount+, and Prime Video.)
10.
Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
Kelly Reichardt’s radically unromantic tale of survival on the Oregon Trail sweats the details, focusing on the arduous day-to-day routines involved in moving across the Oregon high desert in search of a better life. It’s a tough existence even when things are going well, and in Meek’s Cutoff they’re not going well at all. A party led by Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) starts to suspect that their leader doesn’t know what he’s doing but does nothing until the situation has already started to spin out of control. Reichardt makes their lives look exhausting, conveying the high stakes that play into every decision and the panic that sets in when those decisions seem to be leading everyone astray. In her second collaboration with Reichardt, Michelle Williams delivers a complex performance as Emily, a woman who seemingly has no say in her fate — at least at first. Reichardt’s film works both as the story of a specific wrong turn with terrible consequences and as an expression of the awful feeling created by following leaders who seem to have lost their way. (She wasn’t done with the genre, either: Reichardt returned to the West just this year with the excellent First Cow, a story of friendship and hardship among two marginal characters watching civilization take over the far frontier.) (Available to stream on Tubi.)
9.
The Naked Spur (1953)
In Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur, Ralph Meeker plays a character dishonorably discharged from the cavalry on the grounds of being “morally unstable.” (That’s a label that might easily apply to most of the characters in the film, not to mention Mann’s other Westerns.) Meeker plays one of several characters drawn into bounty hunter Howard Kemp’s (James Stewart) attempt to collect an enormous bounty on Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), a murderer and rapist wanted for killing a marshal. Vandergroat’s awful, but Kemp’s no less twisted up inside, driven by revenge, manipulating others into helping him, and unsure what to do about his attraction to Vandergroat’s companion Lina (Janet Leigh), who has conflicts of her own. No one’s purely on the side of good here, and the characters torture each other as Kemp’s obsession grows more intense and his chances to start over begin to dim. Mann and Stewart made eight raw, psychologically complex Westerns together, but none quite match The Naked Spur in intensity, or embody so thoroughly how Mann’s ’50s work transformed the genre. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
8.
Rio Bravo (1959)
Howard Hawks worked in virtually every imaginable film genre, but in each he tended to favor stories about camaraderie between disparate groups of people united for a common cause. In Rio Bravo he found a story he liked so much that he more or less remade it two more times, as El Dorado and Rio Lobo, both of which also starred John Wayne and both scripted, like Rio Bravo, by Leigh Brackett. Here, Wayne plays the wonderfully named Sheriff John T. Chance, whose defense of his drunken friend Dude (Dean Martin) pits him against some less-than-law-abiding ranchers. The film builds to an exciting climax but takes its time getting there, letting Chance and Dude rebuild their relationship as Dude crawls out from under the bottle; bringing in colorful supporting characters played by Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, and others; and occasionally pausing the action for a song or two. Yet Hawks never wastes a moment. It’s the time spent getting to know Rio Bravo’s characters that lets us worry about their fates, and that reveals what matters most to them in the life they’re fighting to protect and the laws they’re determined to uphold. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
7.
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Released the same year as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a far more genial if no less doom-laced story of outlaws facing the end of the road as the Old West era draws to a close, Sam Peckinpah’s landmark Western attracted controversy for its graphic violence, some of it depicted in agonizing detail through slow motion. Was he making audiences consider the ugliness of taking a life? Making bloodshed look disturbingly beautiful? Could he be doing both at once? Ugly, brutal, but not without its dark allure, this was the vision of the West that Peckinpah had been building toward since Ride the High Country. Here he populates the film with a band of outlaws, led by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine, charming enough to make it easy to forget — at least for long stretches — how they make their living and why they’ve come into such dire straits as they try to make one last score before calling it a day. Yet beneath the violence and gritty atmosphere — aspects of the film that would be much imitated in the years that followed — The Wild Bunch builds a story about how honor matters even to those on the wrong side of the law, and the ways even bad men can be haunted by the moments during which they’ve let greed and fear overwhelm their sense of duty. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
6.
Red River (1948)
Like Rio Bravo, Red River is a film only Howard Hawks could have pulled off. Set largely during a long, troubled cattle drive from Texas to Abilene, the film stars John Wayne as Thomas Dunson, a cattle rancher with a tragic past who grows increasingly stern and unforgiving as the drive progresses. As he threatens to turn into an Old West Ahab, his adopted son Matt (Montgomery Clift) grows increasingly concerned, and more resistant to his authority, until a confrontation becomes inevitable and a tragedy the likely outcome. Ultimately, however, Hawks has other plans, and it’s Red River’s humanity — in addition to its sweeping action — that makes it extraordinary. Hawks plays with Wayne’s persona, drawing out the shadows beneath his heroic persona while also emphasizing its tender side via Dunson’s relationship with Matt. It’s one of the most complex characters Wayne would ever play, and here he gets to play it against a backdrop of tremendous danger that threatens to destroy everything he’s built — or push him to tear it apart himself. (Available to stream on MGM+, Pluto TV, and Tubi.)
5.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Many of Robert Altman’s films, particularly in his first run of success in the early ’70s, find him putting his own spin on famous genres, be it the detective film or the war movie. With McCabe & Mrs. Miller Altman turned his attention to the Western and made one like no other before, a wistful, funny, heartbreaking film about one man’s doomed pursuit of happiness in the remote Washington town of Presbyterian Church. Warren Beatty plays McCabe, a drifter and fast-talker who falls in with, and falls in love with, Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a madam who offers to improve business at his low-rent brothel. They find success, but their newfound wealth attracts the attention of a mining company that initially wants to buy him out but uses even stronger tactics to take what it wants. Filmed in snowy Vancouver and set to some of the most melancholy songs Leonard Cohen ever recorded, the film lets a sense of fatalism hang over even its lightest moments. Beatty plays McCabe as a character too charming to lose all the time, but destined to lose big when he does. His short time on top in Presbyterian Church captures the freedom and possibilities of the American frontier, and the promise of America itself. His fate suggests that there might be less to that promise than advertised. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
4.
Stagecoach (1939)
Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? If not, Stagecoach comes pretty close. John Ford’s film made a star of John Wayne as the Ringo Kid, a fugitive from the law who’s called upon to protect a stagecoach traveling through dangerous territory. That it contains nothing less than a cross section of Old West humanity — from an alcoholic doctor to pregnant Army wife to a prostitute and so on — suggests that Ford has ambitions beyond merely staging an exciting story. Stagecoach works first as just that, but it brilliantly weaves its characters’ personal journeys into the action as the journey becomes ever more perilous. This was Ford’s first trip to Monument Valley, which would become his favorite Western location, and his first important collaboration with Wayne, whose onscreen presence he’d help shape and change over the years, giving him more complicated characters as he aged. Here he lets him play the white-hatted hero to tremendous effect in the middle of one of the most influential Westerns ever made, a tremendously entertaining, richly realized film that laid the groundwork for Ford’s future efforts in the genre and inspired countless others to take the Western in new directions. (Available to stream on Pluto TV, Prime Video, and Tubi.)
3.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
After completing the Dollars trilogy, Leone returned to the Western minus his signature star but with a renewed sense of ambition, twisting together an epic story of greed and revenge bigger than anything he’d attempted before. Charles Bronson plays a gunslinger known only as Harmonica (thanks to his musical instrument of choice) who’s locked into a battle of wills with Frank (Henry Fonda), a merciless hired gun with whom Harmonica has a mysterious history. Without losing his trademark dark humor, Leone couples the stylistic bravado of the film’s predecessors to a sense of tragic somberness, focusing on the sacrifices asked by the West and what gets lost as history moves on. He also brings a sense of patience, letting the story play out at a stately pace (at least in the director’s preferred cut) and giving space to co-stars Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards to develop what might otherwise have been stock characters. It’s audacious, too, casting Fonda as not just a bad guy but a sadist and opening with a wordless showdown for which the term “slow burn” is an understatement. It’s Leone’s masterpiece, the film in which he packed everything he wanted to say about the West and its myths. (Available to stream on MGM+, Paramount+, and Prime Video .)
2.
Unforgiven (1992)
In his Best Picture–winning 1992 film, Clint Eastwood plays William Munny, a gunfighter who, inspired by his late wife, has abandoned his old ways for the righteous life of a farmer. Financial troubles compel him to again take up bounty hunting so he can collect a reward posted by a group of prostitutes, who are seeking justice after a pair of ranch hands mutilate one of their own. Working from a screenplay that he’d held on to until he had aged enough to play Munny, Eastwood delivers a meditative, morally complex Western filled with characters who sometimes commit awful acts for righteous reasons, those who commit horrific crimes for no reason at all, and those who just do what they have to do to survive. Munny has been, at varying points, all of the above, and he’s haunted by each experience. It’s left him wondering what all the killing he’s seen and done means, if it means anything at all. Eastwood dedicated Unforgiven to the two directors who’d most shaped his career: Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, neither a stranger to this list. But while their influence can still be seen in Unforgiven, it’s an Eastwood film in every frame, the culmination of his career-long relationship with the genre, and his mixed emotions about the way it mixes heroic iconography, violence, and the sense that a man with a gun can deliver justice. (Available to stream on Apple TV.)
1.
The Searchers (1956)
John Wayne and John Ford made great movies — together and apart — after The Searchers, but that doesn’t make it any less of a culmination. Both had worked in, and thought about, the Western for years by the time they shot this haunting film. Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a man driven by a hate that’s inflamed when Comanches murder Ethan’s brother and other members of his family before kidnapping his two nieces. Ethan and his companions soon find one, Lucy, dead. The other, Debbie (Natalie Wood), they can’t find at all, leading Ethan to scour the West for her as he becomes increasingly twisted by his rage.
Wayne delivers a terrifying performance as a lost soul who uses revenge to excuse the darkness and prejudice already inside him. Through that prejudice, Ford began to address the genre’s treatment of Native Americans, not by softening the actions of the Comanches but by having Ethan respond to monstrous acts with even more monstrous behavior. In one chilling scene, he mutilates a corpse, thus condemning his victim, by Comanche belief, to travel the afterlife blind. But as Martin Scorsese observes in his documentary A Personal Journey Through American Movies, Ethan is just placing his own curse on the corpse because “he’s a drifter, doomed to wander between the winds.” | |||||
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Sixty years after fleeing Vienna, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), an elderly Jewish woman, attempts to reclaim family possessions that were seized by the Nazis. Among them is a famous portrait of Maria’s beloved Aunt Adele: Gustave Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” With the help of young lawyer Randy Schoeberg (Ryan Reynolds), Maria embarks upon a lengthy legal battle to recover this painting and several others, but it will not be easy, for Austria considers them national treasures.
SARAH’S KEY (2010)
Sarah’s Key is one of the few entirely fictional films on the Holocaust, featuring a past and present layer of narrative. The past goes back to 1942, the year when the deportation of the French Jews began in Paris with the infamous Vel d’Hiv Roundup. Following the Strazynski family, whose daughter Sarah (Mélusine Mayance) left her little brother locked up behind a secret door at their home; the film represents the humiliating terror of this event particularly well. The present thread of the narrative follows Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), a journalist working on a story about the Roundup.
DEFIANCCE
DEFIANCE (2008)
In 1941, Nazi soldiers are slaughtering Eastern European Jews by the thousands. Three brothers, Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber) and Asael (Jamie Bell), manage to escape and take refuge in the forest where they played in childhood. Seeking a way to avenge the deaths of their loved ones, the brothers turn their daily struggle for survival into a battle against the Nazis. As news of their exploits spreads, others join the fray, willing to risk their lives for even brief freedom.
BLESSED IS THE MATCH: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HANNAH SENESH (2008)
In 1944, 22-year-old Hannah Senesh parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe with a small group of Jewish volunteers from Palestine. Theirs was the only military rescue mission for Jews that occurred in WWII. Narrated by Joan Allen, the film follows the remarkable journey of this young Hungarian poet and diarist, paratrooper and resistance fighter. Told through Hannah’s letters, diaries and poems, her mother’s memoirs, and the recollections of those who knew and loved her, the film trances her life from her childhood in Budapest to her time in Palestine. Both devastating and inspiring, the film offers an intimate portrait of a singularly talented, courageous and complex girl who believed that one person could be a flame that burns brightly in even the darkest hours.
FUGITIVE PIECES (2007)
“Fugitive Pieces” is a drama directed by Jeremy Podeswa, adapted from the award-winning novel of the same name written by Anne Michaels. It tells the story of Jakob Beer, orphaned in Poland during World War II and saved by a Greek archaeologist. Starring Nina Dobrev and Stephen Dillane, this beautifully portrayed quest for liberation from haunting memories and loss and for love and redemption spans three continents and three generations. Particularly moving is the portrayal of the bond established between the boy and his rescuer, who are very different kinds of refugees, and the historical metaphors that help ground them in the world of the living.
CONSTANTINE’S SWORD (2007)
Author and former priest James Carroll explores his past and confronts religion’s history of violence committed in the name of God. Carroll focuses on Catholic and evangelical anti-Judaism, and invokes the cross as a symbol of the long history of Christian xenophobic violence against Jews and non-Christians, from the Crusades, through the Roman Inquisition and the creation of the Jewish ghetto, to the Holocaust.
FATELESS (2007)
Fateless is a rare example of a Hungarian film achieving international success. In 1944, 14-year-old Hungarian Jew Gyorgy Koves quits school to look after his family when his father is deported by the Nazis to a labor camp. Shortly afterward, Gyorgy is seized during a police raid and sent to Auschwitz. Lying about his age to prevent himself from being gassed with the other children, Gyorgy learns from veteran prisoner Bandi Citrom how to survive as he is sent from one concentration camp to another.
THE RITCHIE BOYS (2004)
The Ritchie Boys is the riveting, untold story of a group of young men who fled Nazi Germany and returned as soldiers in U.S. uniforms. They knew the psychology and the language of the enemy better than anyone. In Camp Ritchie, Maryland, they were trained in intelligence and psychological warfare. Determined, bright, and inventive, they fought their own kind of war; they were victors, not victims.
THE PIANIST (2003)
Hollywood’s adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman autobiography, “The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945,” was a critical smash that won three Oscars. The story is a tragic first-person account as to how Warsaw gradually changes at the beginning of World War II. Szpilman, who is played by a very gaunt Adrien Brody, is eventually forced into the Warsaw Ghetto and separated from his family during Operation Reinhard. The film won director Roman Polanksi his only Oscar for Best Director and also won best adapted screenplay for Ronald Harwood. “The Pianist” is a true tear-jerker that stands the test of time as a great film for its honest and harrowing human portrayal of life under oppression and serves as a brutal reminder for how quickly freedom can be taken away.
AMEN (2002)
Kurt Gerstein is an SS officer employed in the SS Hygiene Institute, planning programs for water purification and destruction of pests. He is horrified to discover that the process he has developed to fight diseases like typhus using a hydrogen cyanide mixture called Zyklon B is being used to kill Jews in the camps. In this movie, directed by Costa Gavras, Gerstein pleads to the pope to stop the genocide, with the help of a young priest, to no avail. In yet another ugly display of human behavior during this dark period of history, the movie draws a disturbing picture of the Vatican’s silence regarding the Holocaust.
THE GREY ZONE (2001)
Based on actual events, “The Grey Zone” is the staggeringly powerful story of the Auschwitz’s twelfth Sonderkommando — one of the thirteen consecutive “Special Squads” of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of helping to kill fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life. From inside the working organs of the infamous Auschwitz death camp, this film asks to what terrible lengths we are willing to go to save our own lives.
CONSPIRACY (2001)
This HBO film is a slow gut-punch of a movie the depicts in eerie detail the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, where senior Nazi officials met to discuss and decided upon the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The film, which is set almost entirely around a dining room table converted into a conference table stars Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth. As the film develops the attendees at the meeting slowly begin to understand that their various mandates in dealing with Jews in Europe has evolved from deportation and evacuation to annihilation. Several of the meeting’s attendees hold out, but are slowly either cajoled or intimidated into supporting the plan, which they learn is already in action as gas chambers and extermination camps are already being built to annihilate an estimated 11 million Jews – including Russian Jews.
INTO THE ARMS OF STRANGERS: STORIES OF THE KINDER-TRANSPORT (2000)
For nine months prior to World War II, in an act of mercy unequalled anywhere else before the war, Britain conducted an extraordinary rescue mission, opening its doors to over 10,000 Jewish and other children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. These children, or Kinder (sing. Kind), as they came to be known, were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. The majority of them never saw their families again.
THE DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC (1999)
Hannah Stern, played by Kirsten Dunst, is a young Jewish girl living in the United States in the late 20th century. On Passover eve, she is bored with the Seder and at one point complains she’s tired of remembering. When she opens the door for the prophet Elijah, she finds herself in Poland in 1942. Deported to a concentration camp and in the face of near-impossible odds, Hannah calls on all her inner resources – including hope and friendship – to survive. Based on a novel by Jane Yolen, the film was directed by Donna Deitch. (Rahel Jaskow)
THE LAST DAYS (1998)
In late 1944, even as they faced imminent defeat, the Nazis expended enormous resources to kill or deport over 425,000 Jews during the “cleansing” of Hungary. This Oscar-winning documentary, executive produced by Steven Spielberg, focuses on the plight of five Hungarian Jews who survived imprisonment in Auschwitz. Though these survivors recount the horrors they witnessed and endured as a result of the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” their individual triumphs are a testament to hope and humanity.
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997)
On its release, “Life is Beautiful” was hotly debated for having the audacity to employ humor in its treatment of the Holocaust. But that is how its protagonist, the Jewish-Italian waiter Guido, always navigated life, so why stop when he and his son are sent to a concentration camp? Both director Roberto Benigni (who co-wrote the script) and his onscreen character have an insatiable zest for life, helping to explain the film’s schizophrenia: It builds slowly from charming romance to Holocaust drama, delivering, from start to finish, a tour de force of the human spirit. Co-starring Nicoletta Braschi.
SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993)
Businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) arrives in Krakow in 1939, ready to make his fortune from World War II, which has just started. After joining the Nazi party primarily for political expediency, he staffs his factory with Jewish workers for similarly pragmatic reasons. When the SS begins killing Jews in the Krakow ghetto, Schindler arranges to have his workers protected to keep his factory in operation, but soon realizes that in so doing, he is also saving innocent lives.
EUROPA EUROPA (1990)
Europa Europa is also based on a true account, of a Jewish boy who masqueraded as a Nazi Party activist to survive the Holocaust. Directed by Agnieszka Holland, who dealt with the Holocaust in several previous films, it tells the story of Solomon Perel, played by Marco Hofschneider. The family escapes to Poland but after its conquest by Germany, Solek is separated from family and lives in an orphanage. When the Nazis arrive, he ditches his papers, declares himself to be “Josef Peters”, an ethnic German and joins their forces in the war with Russia. He is sent to a Hitler Youth school, is almost shot by victorious Russian forces but survives the war – and reaches Israel. The movie won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS (1987)
Director Louis Malle recalls his experiences as a child forever impacted by a friendship that ends in a most horrific way. In 1943 France, upperclass boarding student Julien (Gaspard Manesse) meets, and initially detests, new student Jean (Raphael Fejto). However, the two eventually become good friends, and Julien discovers a secret: Jean is one of several Jewish children the priest running the school is hiding from Nazi police. What unfolds is a beautiful story of friendship that is ripped apart when the Gestapo is tipped off, and Julien unwittingly betrays his friend. The film ends with Malle’s voiceover: “More than 40 years have passed, but I’ll remember every second of that January morning until the day I die.”
SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982)
Stingo (Peter MacNicol), a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie (Meryl Streep) and her lover Nathan (Kevin Kline), he learns that Sophie is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan’s relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan’s fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.
THE PAWNBROKER (1964)
After witnessing the fates of his wife and children at the hands of Nazis, Holocaust survivor Sol (Rod Steiger, in an outstanding Oscar-nominated performance) has become a bitter and detached man. Now running a pawn shop in Harlem, he suffers flashbacks to his time in the concentration camp, causing an emotional detachment that results in tragedy in the present. Sidney Lumet’s haunting tale is credited with being the first American film to show the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor, and continues to be influential and relevant today.
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (1959)
What more can be said about the young Jewish girl who lived in hiding, fearing for her life and the lives of her family members and friends, but also eloquently wrote of hope and belief in the kindness of man? This adaptation of her firsthand account of the events surrounding the Holocaust is considered to be the finest adaptation of her diary, with Millie Perkins giving a poignant portrayal of the inspirational girl, and Shelley Winters winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a fellow Jew in hiding.
NIGHT AND FOG (1956)
Short documentary film that was made ten years after the liberation of German concentration camps. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek established in occupied Poland while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. “Night and Fog” was made in collaboration with scriptwriter Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. The first part of “Night and Fog” shows remnants of Auschwitz while the narrator describes the rise of Nazi ideology. The film continues with comparisons of the life of the Schutzstaffel to the starving prisoners in the camps and their terrible ordeals. The final topic of the film depicts the liberation of the country, the discovery of the horror of the camps, and the questioning of who was responsible for them. | |||||
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] | null | [] | 2023-12-05T09:51:31+00:00 | Regardless of however else you regard them, you cannot deny that Yorgos Lanthimos’s English-language films subsist, to a degree, on shock. The shock is the point. Lanthimos is the successor to the … | en | https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/favicon.ico | Literary Hub | https://lithub.com/poor-things-is-a-curious-phantasmagoria/ | Regardless of however else you regard them, you cannot deny that Yorgos Lanthimos’s English-language films subsist, to a degree, on shock. The shock is the point. Lanthimos is the successor to the legacy of experimental filmmaker Peter Greenaway for his commitment to making films that marry the baroque, the revolting, and even the random. His films abstract interpersonal relationships to extremes, boil people down to urges and desires and bodies and smells and residues and build narratives out of all of that. What results is often shocking.
The problem, though, with a style that boils things down so much to grubby, garish, arresting metaphor, is that Lanthimos’s films often end up saying the same thing as what they are already showing. I’ll explain: in The Lobster (2015), the shock of humans being transformed into animals as punishment for not having a romantic partner is a metaphor for… how, in society, people are shamed for not having a romantic partner. In The Favourite (2018), the shock wrought from an endless barrage of dirt and shit and smut in the early 18th-century English court of Queen Anne underscores… the ickiness and dysfunction of the rich and powerful, a class critique that might feel vanguard if you’ve never read a class critique before. You see what I mean?
These films’ arguments are identical to their narratives, without underlying investigation or inquiry. Lanthimos’s experimental thematic playgrounds and wild luxuriations in the taboo might seem to yield bold movies which are limitless in what they are saying, but, in reality, profoundly are limited to saying only one big thing. And that one thing is really obvious because… it’s the thing the movie is about, upfront.
If that doesn’t bother you, cool. There are, after all, plenty of other reasons to watch (or enjoy, or appreciate) all films/his films, and Lanthimos’s particular talent for milking compelling performances from the talented roster of actors who attach themselves to him might be fulfilling enough. Perhaps his films’ postmodern pessimism interests you: maybe you like movies that are about the depths and depravities that humankind will go to get what they want. Or, maybe you really, really like a wide angle lens. It doesn’t matter. But what I’m saying is that, if you find Lanthimos’s films to be overwrought to the point of simplicity, perhaps you will be intrigued by Poor Things, a film which at least has more than one thing to say.
Poor Things argues that kindness, empathy, compassion are intellectual responses and products of conditioning, rather than natural, human urges.
Poor Things is Lanthimos’s best film (beating out The Killing of a Sacred Deer), and this is because it mobilizes its shocks to push out a thesis statement that is more than a gesture back at its own narrative. Perhaps this is due to the film’s incredibly rich, weird source text, the 1992 novel Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer by the postmodern writer Alasdair Gray. Perhaps it’s the adaptive stylings of screenwriter Tony McNamara.
The story is about a woman named Bella (Emma Stone) who lives in the palatial London home of the scientist and professor Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Despite her adult body, she has a child’s brain; one that appears to be learning and growing and developing the way a child’s brain would be. She is Baxter’s daughter, but more than that—she is his creation, his experiment. Baxter, part Dr. Frankenstein, part Dr. Moreau (and really reminding me, in visage and voice, of William Hickey’s Dr. Finkelstein from The Nightmare Before Christmas), has built her, and now he is raising her. She is brash, blunt, silly, grabby, and (possibly because of her adult endocrine system) extremely horny.
This poses some challenges for Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), Baxter’s assistant, because he’s already fallen in love with her, even though her brain is still maturing. It poses no challenges for Baxter’s libertine lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, having fun), who invites Bella to go on a European cruise with him. He promises to show her the sights, but it’s clear they’re mostly going to take turns looking at his bedroom ceiling.
Nonetheless, the cruise does expand her horizons—she begins to hash ideas with worldly fellow passengers, played by Jerrod Carmichael and New German Cinema icon Hanna Schygulla (a fun cameo, since she played the eponymous sexual adventuress in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun), and explore various European cities. She begins to become interested in books. And she decides to make her own way in the world, putting her in the employ of a skeletal Parisian madam (the incomparable Kathryn Hunter). There’s a lot more, but rather than spoil, I’ll say that it all falls under the parasol of Bella’s self-propelled journey toward autonomy and achievement.
Poor Things is a coming-of-age story at its core, brought to life by Stone’s committed, vigorous performance. She deftly captures numerous stages of human development—waddling and babbling as a toddler, awkwardly embracing language as a young child, complaining and whining as a preteen, rebelling as a teenager, and coming into her own as a young woman—not only effectively, but seamlessly and coherently.
She grows and learns before our eyes—discovering her body first, and then her mind. Poor Things is a story about a woman who develops by chasing her own interests and desires without having those tamped down, hampered, or abashed by society. In fact, Bella seems rather immune to shame or humiliation or most negative outside pressures; she picks and chooses the hallmarks of society that she will allow to influence and shape her.
Poor Things is a coming-of-age story at its core, brought to life by Stone’s committed, vigorous performance.
The emotional connection she has to the quirky mad scientist Baxter is a secondary (but still important) motivator for her; as in Edward Scissorhands, another movie about a Frankenstien’s monster-type who goes out into the world, the creator is a benevolent father (literally, Bella abbreviates “Godwin” to “God”; it’s also the last name of Mary Shelley’s father, a rich and knowing allusion). Buried in strata of comically disfiguring prosthetics, Dafoe gives a heart-melting performance as a worried and admiring guardian.
His relationship to Bella, which involves teaching her, germinates the film’s productive and fascinating thesis statement: Poor Things argues that kindness, empathy, compassion are intellectual (read: learned) responses and products of conditioning, rather than natural, human urges. Again, this productive dimension might be a vestigial hypothesis from its very clever source text, but it does helpfully buoy the film with meaning beyond its carnival of references.
Poor Things‘ question of “nature vs. nurture” underscores the work of Victorian scientist Francis Galton, which keeps it in line with its Victorian setting. But Poor Things doesn’t have a historical setting like The Favourite does; the late Victorian world of Poor Things is a dream, a pastel, futuristic wonderland full of kooky and supercilious technologies and an architectural style that only can be described as “Antoni Gaudí on acid.” (At times, it’s “Gaudí on DALL-E.”) Except of course for the black-and-white sequences in Godwin’s laboratory-cum-home, which are heavily indebted to James Whale’s films Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
It’s worth saying that the production design of Poor Things is phenomenal; from sets to costumes to hair and makeup, the film creates its own fascinating, mixed-up, carried-away aesthetic that feels childlike in its wonderment and expert in its precision. And Stone’s physical transformation into Bella, with a stream of long black hair and a pair of enormous eyebrows setting a proscenium for her giant, expressive, alien eyes, produces a whole new genre of facial expressions. This is, by the way, Stone’s best dramatic performance.
Poor Things presents a dreamlike, imaginary history of the era that birthed the modern Western world. As Bella bounces around the great ideas of the moment, like a philosophical Forrest Gump, she assimilates them. The story of the moment becomes her story. And it’s a good story, most of the time.
But as with every one of Lanthimos’s films, I kept noticing little moments that felt extradiegetically callous or unethical, beyond his films’ usual habits of, say, gratuitous animal abuse. When Max McCandless sees the nonverbal Bella for the first time, he exclaims, “what a very pretty retard!” This isn’t a line from the book, and it is unclear why this phrase would be in the script except to trigger surprised laughter; any attempt to claim a defense of historical commitment for that kind of derogatory language is debunked by the film’s general reveling in historical inaccuracy (see Dr. Baxter’s stomach-acid-generating machine or all of the brain transplants that take place). Lanthimos’s films, in their gleeful commitment to the filthy, smutty, illicit, vulgar, appalling, indecorous, verboten, and scandalous sides of human existence, inevitably take things too far into the realm of bad taste. (To be clear, I’m not talking about the film’s millions of sex scenes. Good for her!)
Narratively, at times, Poor Things also becomes too much, too excited to see what happens when Bella is turned loose on X situation or presented with Y variables. Bella drives the film to its own most shocking moments, with her own unbothered attitudes making them feel as surprising or weird or fun or silly as they are. I am curious, without having access to the script, how many of the film’s sequences were ad-libbed with Stone firmly strapped into character, navigating the world like an audacious child.
While it’s helpful how committed the film is to following her character, sometimes parts of her adventure feel bloated and redundant, especially at the expense of the film’s very quick but crucial third act. That third act careens the film into themes, questions, and conclusions that I don’t think (despite Bella’s maturation) it’s ready for, leading towards an oversimplified conclusion that reduces the whole experience. Towards the end, I felt like a teacher disappointed at the final exam grade of a promising student.
But I’ve been thinking fondly about Poor Things since I saw it almost two months ago, something I’ve never experienced with regard to any other of Lanthimos’s English-language films. Mostly, I think, this is because of the strength of the film’s playful reworking of the all-too-familiar Frankenstein story in its first act, and its character-driven experimentation in its second. And because of the performances of Stone and Dafoe, which seem to promise caricature but burst with memorable individuality and personality. It’s a whirlwind of a film, but, as it spins round and round and round, it reveals a center that might be porous but isn’t hollow. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 6 | https://cherwell.org/2023/01/21/pretty-privilege/ | en | The ugly truth about pretty privilege | [
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"Sahar Malaika"
] | 2023-01-21T00:00:00 | Before I begin, I’d like to say thank you to all students that interacted with the forms and polls that were released to gather information for this article. To those of you that are struggling with the issues addressed in this article, please seek help from your college welfare supporters or the University’s welfare service. The appropriate contact details are below. | en | Cherwell | https://cherwell.org/2023/01/21/pretty-privilege/ | CW: Eating disorders, racism, body dysmorphia, references to sexual violence.
Before I begin, I’d like to say thank you to all students that interacted with the forms and polls that were released to gather information for this article. To those of you that are struggling with the issues addressed in this article, please seek help from your college welfare supporters or the University’s welfare service. The appropriate contact details are below.
Charlie’s Angels (2000). A film made from an old-school TV show about gorgeous women spies. What’s the tactic? To take advantage of the fact that men are unsuspecting of beautiful women, making them the perfect spies. Whilst this nurtured an adoration for films and was somewhat empowering for young Sahar, watching it recently, I’ve realised that this is a prime example of pretty privilege. Yes, I’m basing this article off of a cheesy 2000s film that was probably my queer awakening, however, it doesn’t remove from the fact that pretty privilege not only exists but has a deep-seated place in Oxford. Growing up with films like this in conjunction with ideas of what it was to be “pretty” or conventionally attractive – and more the fact that this was not what I looked like – I was taught that pretty privilege was just the way that the world works. This didn’t change when I matriculated, even though my relationship with my appearance improved, and I would come to realise, especially in a context where I was expected to be more outgoing, that there were moments in which I would be overlooked in the “attraction” department.
I started writing this article as part of an exploration as to whether anyone else felt like this as well. It turned into a revelation about how prevalent pretty privilege is at Oxford. 70% of people that responded to our Instagram poll recognised that pretty privilege is a problem and 34% even acknowledged that they’d been positively affected by it. It’s safe to say that most people can at least come up with a definition for it:
“For me, pretty privilege means greater freedom and social opportunities”
“Pretty privileged to me is being treated like you’re worth more than others, just because of appearances”
I think you get it.
Pretty privilege has a diverse impact on Oxford students, not only in the way that it is advantageous for certain people but also in how very many students oppressively feel it in their lives here. Of course, where most people feel it most is in the dating scene:
“I got into my first and only proper relationship at the big age of 19. I never thought I was pretty enough to have a partner.”
Before I carry on, I want to linger on this statement for a minute. A lot of the time, you’ll hear an Oxford student say that they never dated or were in a relationship before university because they were working or studying. Therefore, when we get to Oxford (especially in Michaelmas term of first year), the overwhelming pressure to get with the person to your left can be incredibly terrifying when you haven’t, first, addressed possible factors that will have knocked your confidence in the dating scene that can be attributed to pretty privilege. Now, I’m not saying that everyone who has said this has the same experience, but I also want us to realise that it is possible for these things to come hand in hand. One response, even without naming pretty privilege, showed how this was strikingly present in dating apps:
“Once, I was added to a group chat of unknown numbers where they made fun of my appearance… There’s a reason I don’t use dating apps. I don’t know what pretty privilege is, but it’s probably avoiding that harassment.”
Whilst dating apps can be used to facilitate healthy and long-term relationships and romantic interactions, I don’t think we acknowledge how often they facilitate pretty privilege when someone is only deciding to go on a date with you based on your appearance. After a conversation with a friend, we also realised that the reason we felt so insecure on dating apps was because we didn’t fit into the cookie-cutter image that appealed to most others on it. These people shared this experience:
“I feel like people overlook me, before they get to know me”
“There are moments that you remember yourself, and you realise that you’re not attractive here. This is not your space to be loved or appreciated for the way you look.”
“it just feels like men often don’t want a woman who is bigger than them – they want someone small and slim and kind of dainty?”
Dating apps, completely based around pictures with “a few questions” to keep up the pretence of connecting people through their personalities, exacerbate so many issues around body image such as body dysmorphia and possibly even eating disorders – especially as a woman because of the way that the heterosexual dating scene expects women to fit a certain image for the sake of men. A couple of interviewees who identified as queer described how pretty privilege seems to exist less frequently in the LGBTQ+ scene at Oxford; “embracing the queerness” of their appearances – in the way that they didn’t fit into the male gaze – allowed them to become more confident with themselves and alleviated the pressures to look a certain way. However, unfortunately, the queer scene is not immune to the influence of pretty privilege. This was a heart-breaking response to our google form:
“I think all of these issues with body image and the lack of plus size people in Oxford is heightened in the queer scene – it feels like there’s a cookie cutter image of what “queer” looks like at this uni and that’s often very skinny and white. The only place that I’ve actually been verbally assaulted about my weight in Oxford is in the gay club Plush, on several occasions by queer men/nbs who have shouted things like “fat bitch” and worse at me while I’m just dancing with my friends or trying to get out there in the queer scene and meet someone.”
“As a queer woman, I feel particularly insecure when getting with other queer women/I feel myself comparing myself more which is stupid”
This need to be more “feminine” might not be as present amongst the queer community here, but it still presents itself when queer students “seem to care about the male gaze much more than the female gaze”. One student also said that, regardless of how feminine they were, they were worried that they weren’t “‘gay enough’ for women.” Pretty privilege also presents itself in the queer scene through the way that it affects trans and non-binary students:
“It’s difficult navigating dating – wanting to be seen as attractive and seen as my gender can feel at odds with each other. I worry I am only considered attractive when I’m not being seen as my gender.”
“Trans women especially I’ve seen be more likely to be misgendered and mistreated if they aren’t deemed attractive or feminine enough to “pass”.
Whilst the queer scene can serve as some sort of an escape from cis and heteronormative standards of beauty, there are still people within this community that hold these values.
I also received an overwhelming percentage of written responses from people of colour. Before I show them to you, I want to give you a quote from Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie came to me when I read these responses: “You know, when we go out, my friends get chatted up by guys who say, ‘I’d love to take you for dinner, and in the same breath they come over to me, put their hands on my bum and tell me they want to take me back to theirs and fuck me”. I think it perfectly encompasses the disparity that is felt between the treatment of people of colour and white people, especially in the dating scene. The only thing that I would add is the way that there were other people of colour who these same guys would overlook. These were a couple of other responses that I received:
“I’ve never dated so I wouldn’t know, but I’ve low-key accepted that I might be single for the duration of my degree, because I think it’s harder to date as a POC here. Not only do I worry about not meeting the beauty standard, I do want to meet someone who’ll like me for me, and not fetishise me.”
“Look around and ask why so many beautiful beautiful WOC are passed over in Oxford compared to fairly average-looking blonde upper-class counterparts – there are exceptions but it’s so weird to see attractive people at uni regularly discussed without anyone mentioning this.”
I’m sure at this point you’ll have noticed that I’ve focussed a lot on the dating scene at Oxford. This is, in part, because many of those who responded to my survey would bring up how they’ve been impacted by pretty privilege in Oxford without prompting. It is also because I think that the impacts of pretty privilege are exacerbated and demonstrated more strongly in the prominence of the dating scene in Oxford. It is a brilliant demonstration of how those who benefit from pretty privilege receive more attention or free drinks based on the way that they look.
When asked about how others have experienced pretty privilege, this was a common response that I received:
“A lot of people who have pretty privilege don’t particularly like to admit it, I’ve found they like what they get from it. It’s not a bad thing and it makes a lot of sense, no one would pass up the opportunity realistically”
This is a really difficult problem to be faced with because when someone benefits from pretty privilege, they may not realise it because being given a free drink or a discount by someone who likes the way you look could easily be interpreted as that person “just being nice”. They may not even see themselves as pretty and won’t see it as pretty privilege in the first place. But someone else may step up behind them, not as conventionally attractive, and get a nod before they’re charged the full price for the same thing. It’s a sure way to strike down someone’s confidence especially when no-one around you can see what all of these people have done wrong. A lot of the time, it comes across as confidence or sociability:
“Friends who are absolutely beautiful with regard to conventional beauty standards tend to make friends more easily I think – they never EVER acknowledge that their appearance has anything to do with this though”
It can take time to realise this. When you first find these friends, it seems as though they’re just confident. It’s inspiring! They serve as role models to boost your own confidence and need to be outgoing. Suddenly, one day, the penny drops. The likelihood is that their confidence comes hand in hand with the fact that they’ve not had to scrutinise every physical aspect of themselves to get what they want. For example, one interviewee described how she internalised people’s opinion that her afro-textured hair would be “taking up too much space”. As a result of this, she became aware of how her personality took up too much space. The same has been said by interviewees that felt self-conscious about their weight:
“Being overweight naturally means you take up more space so I have a fear of taking up even more space ‘than necessary’.”
It’s a frustrating never-ending cycle of both external and internal bias surrounding your appearance which means that whether or not we fit into the frame of “pretty” also has a huge impact on our confidence. Even if they share their free meal with you, it may not necessarily soften this blow at all.
However, I don’t want to ignore the fact that pretty privilege is not costly to those who might benefit from it. For example, one person brought up how, whilst she has benefited from economic pretty privilege (in receiving gifts etc.), she has felt that she has suffered from “the beauty penalty as a woman in an academic setting” because “if there’s a woman who got somewhere high up, yeah, they either slept their way to the top, flirted their way to the top, or somebody liked the look of them and wanted them to hang around”. Some people also discussed how being pretty opened you up to sexual violence:
“If you’re a woman then [pretty privilege] is sort of balanced out by the fact that you’re going to get catcalled and objectified and have a sexual harassment and sexual violence like that.”
Prettiness can also be distorted for non-binary and trans students:
“For afab non-binary people – people such as myself, it can be the other way around and “prettiness” becomes less of a privilege, as it is often be tied to being misgendered as a woman.”
This has been a difficult article to write because, honestly, it seems like there’s no winning, and the only truth that I’ve found in this is that these qualities, these conventions of pretty privilege benefit one person and one person only and that is the (usually straight) tall, athletic, rich, white, blonde man that we all see as the Oxford poster boy.
Well, what’s our solution to all of this? One of my interviewees highlighted that this is not something that can be measurable in the same way that a company could measure how many employees are women/people of colour/non-binary people. However, just because this is not a measurable bias, this should not be your response:
“It isn’t gonna stop, so grit your teeth and bare it”
Please don’t let this stick with you, despite the “doom and gloom” feeling of this article so far. Yes, we’ve seen that pretty privilege exists and that Oxford is not immune to it. I don’t want to let the pedestaled image of the Oxford poster boy damage your confidence any more than it has already. We didn’t let that guy stop us from getting here, we didn’t let him stop us from studying the subject that we love, hating the texts we have to read (thanks Milton), or the tute sheet that’s staring at you from your desk. Please! What authority does he have to make you look in the mirror and hate yourself? Or stop you from having a boogie at the musicals night at the Bullingdon, auditioning for your favourite play, or asking out that person you’ve been ogling at in the RadCam? The best takeaway that I’ve had from these surveys and interviews is that people have felt more able to express their individuality in Oxford. Yes, this place was made for that poster boy, the man who can give you a charming smile or will promise his entire trust fund to the “thin sexy hooker virgin with boobs and hips but not big ones”(see Leading Lady Parts, BBC on Youtube). But look around you. We’re not all Keira Knightley or Jonathan Bailey but nor should we be. If this sermon didn’t do it for you from yet another student journalist, then try my favourite pieces of advice that some of our interviewees would give their Fresher/Term1 self:
“Oxford is a bubble and other people’s perceptions of you don’t matter! Everyone is beautiful”
“Don’t stress about your appearance, there’s not much you can do about it. Just be grateful for what you have, think of all the things you like about your appearance and focus on being your best self. A beautiful personality goes a long way :))”
Stick that on a Fresher’s T-Shirt.
Support information:
For student counselling services please email: [email protected].
Nightline: 01865 270 270
Sexual harrassment support service: supportservice@danselinger
Image credit: W.S. Luk | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 73 | https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/75/8/30/2842447/Physics-is-for-girls-Contrary-to-modern | en | Physics … is for girls? | [
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"Behrman, Joanna"
] | 2022-08-01T00:00:00 | Contrary to modern stereotypes, the laws of the natural world used to be considered a fundamental part of young women’s education. | en | //aipp.silverchair-cdn.com/Themes/Client/app/img/favicons/v-638576255413937918/apple-touch-icon.png | AIP Publishing | https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/75/8/30/2842447/Physics-is-for-girls-Contrary-to-modern | Do you ever see a rainbow when it rains, unless the Sun shines bright?
I do not.
Then what two things are necessary to make a rainbow?
A bright sunshine and a shower.
Why is the rainbow so beautiful?
It has beautiful bright colors, a splendid arch, and when we see it we remember the promise which God made to Noah, that he would not drown the world again.
Why does the RAINBOW make you think of that promise?
Because God said that the bow in the cloud should be a sign that he would never drown the world again.
Then when we see the rainbow, is it not as if God was speaking that promise to us?
It is; and it should make us very happy, and grateful to our heavenly Father for such kindness to us, whenever we look at the rainbow in the cloud. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 71 | 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 | 11 | https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/exploring-movie-construction-and-production/chapter/2-what-is-genre-and-how-is-it-determined/ | en | 2. What Is Genre and How Is It Determined? – Exploring Movie Construction and Production | [
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"John Reich"
] | 2017-07-11T00:00:00 | en | https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/exploring-movie-construction-and-production/chapter/2-what-is-genre-and-how-is-it-determined/ | Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language defines genre as “a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content.”
In other words, genre categorizes movies. Categorizing movies makes it easier for the viewer to discover what he or she likes and will want to see. Putting a movie into a particular genre or category does not diminish the quality of the movie by assuming that if it can be put into a genre, the movie is ordinary and lacks originality and creativity.
Genre consists of four elements or parts: character, story, plot and setting. An equation for remembering the genre is: Story (Action) + Plot + Character + Setting = Genre. This becomes an easy way to remember the elements of a genre.
The above elements of story, plot, setting, and character equal a specific category of movie. These elements are discussed regarding how their variations create a different category of movie.
Some genres may be as general as comedy but do not have sub-genres like comedy. The sub-genres of comedy differ from one another based on the fluctuations of the characters and the story.
Other genres are crime, war, Westerns, spy, adventure, science fiction, horror, fantasy, biography, and mystery. This is why this chapter is longer than the others because of the discussion of these variations.
Drama can be considered a genre, even though some critics do not consider it a genre because it is too general. If the movie elements are serious and cannot fit into a more limited genre, then it can be considered a drama.
Categorizing a movie indirectly assists in shaping the characters and the story of the movie. The shaping determines the plot and best setting to use.
Movies often have genres that overlap, such as adventure in a spy movie, or crime in a science fiction movie. But one genre is predominant.
Other movie labels cannot be considered genres. Film noir, thrillers, and action movies are not actually genres but a director’s style, which will be discussed in a later chapter. They are considered director’s style because their characteristics include cinematography and editing, which are not among the four elements that make up a genre. These labels reflect or accentuate the movie genre rather than defining the genre.
Likewise, musicals and animation are not considered genres but rather “treatments” as to how a particular movie genre is told, even though people, over generations, refer to these types of movies as genres.
You have to be very specific in the discussion of movie terminology, sticking within the particular definition of the terms. Some people will say that genres are labels that are given to stock movies, stating that these movies are routine. Being labeled in a genre is not a negative action.
Movies have their own personalities. Each movie is different. Having a movie labeled in a genre assists people to find a particular movie that they may be interested in watching. Many people like a specific genre or two and will only watch movies in those genres.
What People Like the Most about a Movie
People will state that a particular movie had a good plot or an intriguing story. What people are actually referring to is that they enjoyed the characters, the problems/conflict the characters got into, and how the characters got out of the problems and conflict.
People love a movie because they like to watch characters/people. How many people do you know who like to go to the mall, plaza, or beach and state that they like to people watch? How many people are nosey neighbors because they like to watch what is going on with the people around them?
People may like to watch crime movies or Westerns. They like characters within this particular type of story because of the amount of action or the time period setting. People may like Westerns because they wish they lived in the 19th century because it was considered a simpler time.
Let the Genres Begin
We will begin to discuss the different genres, and even the sub-genres, for certain genre types. I will give a hypothetical example of each so you will begin to see how different genres are formed.
Keep in mind with movie genre, it is the characters that make the movie, and this term is obvious enough that no explanation is needed.
The story is the situation that the characters are in and try to get out of, accomplish, conquer, or overcome. The story has a beginning, middle, and end. More discussion about those will be given in Chapter Three.
The plot is the outline or how the story is told. Remember when people state that they did not like the plot? What they are referring to is that they did not like the story. I will be referring to this concept over and over again throughout the book.
There are only a limited number of plots as the plot is a general outline for a story, like revenge. A particular plot describes how a story will begin, develop, and end. This type of story will have a different format than a plot such as man against nature or man versus the government.
In addition, as we progress through genres, we want to examine how the genre elements change.
You will be able to see that the background and actions of the characters change as the type of stories are different. The setting is dependent upon the story, but the plot remains the same.
I want to stress that we are going through the different genres so character and story development can be seen for each of the genres rather than just giving a general overview of the term genre. I want you to see how only certain elements are contained in a genre, and other elements outside of character, story, plot, and setting are not part of determining a genre.
Comedy Genre
We begin by discussing one of the most popular, general, and complicated genres—comedy.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines comedy simply as “a play, movie, television program, novel, etc., that is meant to make people laugh.” We will discuss comedy in a little more detail than that.
Everybody likes a comedy because everybody likes to laugh and feel good. People like to watch a comedy after a bad day, because once the movie has ended, you can deal with the negativity of the day easier. This is why even horrendous comedy movies can end up making a profit.
The characters and story for a comedy hinge on three areas: the unexpected, the unusual, and repetition. These three areas will generally make people laugh. Generally, a comedy will have a happy ending. Even though some people will deny it, everybody likes a happy ending because it makes them feel good. This is why comedies are so popular.
The complicated part of the comedy genre is that there are different types or sub-genres of comedy; depending upon how outrageous and impossible the characters and story are in the movie. Keep in mind that the plot is general, and the setting can be set in any time or any place.
We will discuss the comedy genre in terms of the different sub-genres of comedies and how the characters and story vary per sub-genre.
Comedies run a gamut, ranging from very physical to nonsensical to subtle to dark. We will discuss the sub-genres in that order, using the same hypothetical example but varying it to show how the different comedy sub-genres will change the characters’ personalities and actions and the story.
The sub-genres of comedy are slapstick, farce, satire, and dark. Any other genres are a variation of these four types. Comedy is actually a variation of physical action and ridicule. The only exception is screwball comedy.
Screwball comedy has many different traits that are outside of a genre. Screwball comedy, because it existed during the Great Depression, contains class conflict between the middle and lower classes and the upper class, along with other peculiarities that only existed during that time period.
Finally, “chick flicks” are generally comedy movies that star women. The Urban Dictionary defines chick flicks as “A film that indulges in the hopes and dreams of women and/or girls and has a happy, fuzzy, ridiculously unrealistic ending.” No doubt the concept of chick flicks goes back to what was previously mentioned; people like a particular type of movie because of the characters in the movie.
Slapstick Comedy
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines slapstick as comedy that involves physical action (such as falling down or hitting people). Slapstick comedy, because of the physical action, which becomes extreme at times, has unrealistic characters in an unbelievable story or possibly a story linked together by episodes of the main character’s/protagonist’s life.
The plot is an inner conflict that builds and ends with these various comedic episodes. The setting can be any time or place that best exemplifies the comic antics that the characters go through.
Let’s take a look at an example that demonstrates these elements.
Jack is down on his luck. He helps a girl, Suzie, whose car broke down near where Jack works. He helps her, and then she leaves, but he cannot get her out of his mind.
Then he sees her in one of his classes. He is afraid to talk to her though. Every time he tries to go up to her, he either stumbles and falls or gets involved with helping someone with disastrous consequences. The last time someone asked him to hold onto one of the ropes of the theatre rigging system where the backdrops were attached, too many stage weights attached to the rigging resulted in Jack flying into the air because he did not let go of the rope.
As luck always has it in a slapstick comedy, Suzie is still driving the old broken down car. She breaks down again in almost the same locations as last time. Jack swallowed what little pride he had left, and went to help her. He got her car started, but she did not drive away immediately after getting it fixed but stayed to talk to Jack. They talk, kiss, and accidentally turn the outside sprinkler system on, getting soaking wet in the romantic conclusion.
From this example, you can see that slapstick comedy is all about the characters and the episodic situations that they get into, resulting in physical comedy. The plot is inner conflict where Jack, the protagonist, wants to turn his life around. This then becomes the story. The story has a climax between Jack and Suzie. The setting is a college campus.
Farce
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines farce as “a funny play or movie about ridiculous situations and events.”
Plot has more prominence in farce than in slapstick because there is a satirical story. In other words, the story concerns a topic that is ridiculed in an extreme way. We can adjust the last example quite easily to demonstrate this.
Jack and Suzie are college students, and Alec is a well-known actor coming to the campus to play a role in the theatrical production at the college. This event has been arranged so the college theatre department can make money. Jack takes a dislike to Alec, but Suzie finds him fascinating. Alec finds himself fascinating. Slapstick is shown by the over-the-top acting that Alec does.
Jack has a difficult time wondering why Alec is famous. Suzie soon finds disenchantment with Alec because he is only concerned about himself. Jack and Suzie and the other theatre majors decide to take the actions of the play to the extreme to humiliate and humble Alec.
In a water scene, where Alec is supposed to pantomime having water thrown on him, real water is used. This drives Alec into a hysterical rage, and he chases Jack and Suzie on stage, off the stage, around the theatre, and out the theatre doors. Alec winds up accidently knocking himself unconscious. Jack states that the most natural acting that Alec has done is being knocked out.
Next, Jack develops a hair-brained scheme so the theatre department can make money. Jack and Suzie make a list of the wealthiest men and women in the area. They invite as many of these wealthy people in the area to participate in an auction. There will be five male winners and five female winners. The prize is that they win Jack and Suzie for a day to act as their slaves.
You can see that a farce has more of a story than slapstick comedy. The plot has an inner conflict of the protagonists, Jack and Suzie, needing money. This creates a story where college theatre students try outrageous ways to make money to save the theatre department. The story ridicules colleges, actors, and theatres in general. The actions of the characters are very slapstick with physical comedy throughout the movie.
Satire
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines satire as “a way of using humor to show that someone or something is foolish, weak, bad, etc.: humor that shows the weaknesses or bad qualities of a person, government, society, etc.”
Satire is subtler than farce or slapstick in the actions of the characters. The plot develops an inner conflict, but the story is more realistic and may, at times, not even appear to be a comedy.
In this example, the setting can remain as a college campus.
Jack and Suzie, once again, are college students. Alec, though, is the instructor, who has a drinking problem, and he is directing a class that Jack and Suzie have to take as a requirement of their theatre major. Alec tries to convince the students that there is no right or wrong way to direct, act, or design. In his mind, theatre is all done with emotion. If it feels right, then do it. In order to help them understand and develop their talents as directors, Alec gives the same answer to any question Jack and Suzie ask: “If it feels right, then do it.”
Jack struggles to try and comprehend what Alec’s statement means. He does not understand why he has to go through four years of college if he just has to recognize what feels right. Jack asks Alec for more of a discussion on what feels right. Alec then tells him, “You’ll know.” This frustrates Jack even more because it does not take four years in college to put to use nine words that do not mean anything specific in regard to studying theatre. He questions the college administration as to why they are paying so much for Alec. The college administration retorts that Alec is one of the best in his field. Jack states that Alec teaches absolutely nothing of any value. The administration states, “That shows how good he is; you do not even realize the education you are receiving.”
Defeated, Jack goes to see Suzie, his last hope. Suzie tells him not to be too quick to judge. Suzie states that she believes she understands what Alec is driving at with his ideas. Suzie tries to demonstrate the statements that Alec has mentioned. After a few hours Suzie becomes frustrated and states the both of them must go to see Alec.
After two hours with Alec, Jack and Suzie are delirious. Being delirious, they finally fathom what Alec means. They both run out of Alec’s house and down the street shouting, “We have identified what it is!”
From this discussion of the characters and story, physical actions do not enter as a predominant element that they do in straight slapstick or farce. The satire is an obvious ridicule of theatre as a major and the type of people in theatre.
A more subtle satire would be Jack and Suzie acting as a clique and by being prima donnas. They mock a new theatre major, Alec, who wants to do a good job. Alec starts to develop his talent under strenuous and often humorous situations with consequences to the amazement of Jack and Suzie. But then he realizes what he has to give up for it. He quits for his own self-respect.
The above are two demonstrations of satire.
The first example, depending on the treatment, could become either a farce, if Jack’s, Suzie’s, or Alec’s actions become too outrageous, exaggerated, and over-the-top, or it could become a satire. The line of demarcation between farce and satire are, as with anything that is analytical, left up to an individual’s judgment. When does extreme satire become farce? A good way to judge farce or satire is how much unrealistic physical comedy is in the movie.
Dark Comedy or Black Comedy
Dictionary.com defines dark humor or black comedy as “in literature and drama, combining the morbid and grotesque with humor and farce to give a disturbing effect and convey the absurdity and cruelty of life.”
Dark humor and black comedy are terms that make fun of or ridicule taboo topics like death. The characters are involved in a story that goes to the point of being grotesque and not being funny.
With this example of a college theatre as the setting, and the plot being the inner conflict of the main character, how can the characters and story become absurd, morbid, and grotesque when discussing the taboo topic of death? Quite easily actually!
Insecure about his acting ability and visibly showing this in public auditions, Jack does not obtain the role on stage that he desires, Henry V or “Hank 5,” which is Jack’s nickname for him. In order to relieve himself of his frustrations, Jack tortures and kills everyone who receives this part in the most brutally visual ways imaginable. He does this in hopes of eventually receiving this specific coveted role. Jack, though, is the only one who believes this role is so desirable and sought after.
Jack kills the first person who is given the role, Alec, by drawing and quartering him before he hangs him.
The second person to be given the role is Suzie, which really angers and infuriates Jack that a woman would get the role before him. This action adds absurdity to the story.
This is a dark humor movie rather than a serious movie because of the reasons, background, and extreme actions in the story. The characters act realistically based on their personalities, which are all unusual. The physical action is real so this scenario cannot be considered slapstick.
Screwball Comedy
This comedy sub-genre is named after a baseball pitch, the screwball, which was perfected by baseball pitcher Carl Hubbell in the 1930s. Screwball comedy only lasted from 1934, when the Great Depression was in full swing, to 1941, when World War II began.
Screwball comedy was based on reverse class snobbery where it is more noble to be poor than rich. The rich were portrayed as eccentric and wasteful fools. Romance is one of the key elements of screwball comedy. With the two classes of upper and lower or middle class working together, screwball comedies can be considered as recommending socialism. The story is a little different, but overall, it can be considered within the realm of satire because the current society was being ridiculed.
Screwball comedy also had the following attributes:
The poor and middle class would go to the movies to see the rich get their comeuppance. This is why movies were one of the few industries of the period that made a profit. People felt a passion of hate toward the upper class because of the mess lower classes assumed the upper class made of the economy.
Many of the most famous movie stars of the period appeared in screwball comedies.
People went to the movies to see the elegant clothes, cars, and furniture, so they could wish they had those items.
Any referral to a movie as a screwball comedy after 1941 is inaccurate, even if it is a re-make of a movie released during the 1934-1941 period. A re-make does not have the same relevancy, power, or passion as the original movie.
A contemporary screwball-type comedy generally is fast paced with an eccentric character, but it does not have the class snobbery. Any class snobbery in the movie does not have the contemptable hatred toward the upper class as it did these movies during the Great Depression. The emotional rage cannot be duplicated.
Romantic Comedy
Dictionary.com defines romantic comedy as “a light and humorous movie, play, etc., whose central plot is a happy love story.”
Romantic comedy is contained in most comedies as a sub-story, such as The Front Page, which has an underlying romantic story of Hildy wanting to marry his fiancée and leave newspaper reporting. However, the overriding story of the movie concerns reporters and editors doing anything in order to get the story.
Comic romance is a big element in screwball comedy also, but other story lines are more dominant. Can you think of a movie that has the primary story line as being a romantic relationship? If you can, how did you like the movie?
Comedy Conclusion
Comedy is varied and complex. You can see how the stories, along with the personalities and actions of the characters, change, developing different sub-genres of the comedy being expressed. All comedy stems from either slapstick or satire.
Let’s move on to a new genre.
Crime Genre
Staying with the letter “C,” let’s move on to the crime genre.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines crime as “an act or the commission of an act that is forbidden or the omission of a duty that is commanded by a public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law” or more simply “a grave offense especially against morality.” The definition gives us a lot to work with, so we will do our best to bring it into focus.
The first point is that every aspect of the crime genre is dramatic, so the elements are quite different than a comedy. The setting for crime genre can be any location in the world and any year, because crime is something that has always existed in society. We will try to narrow this down for our example.
The plot is an inner conflict for the criminal to succeed or for the “good guy” to succeed. The story is a series of developing incidents where the criminal or the “good guy” is the protagonist and a conflict has to be overcome. The characters develop from the story and plot.
Let’s demonstrate two examples with Jack being the protagonist in both situations. In the first situation, Jack is a criminal and the second one Jack is the “good guy.”
First situation: Jack is a nice, helpful individual at the beginning of the movie. He soon finds that he has to help a friend, Suzie, get out of a jam because she owes a lot of money to a gambling boss, Alec. Jack goes and begins to negotiate honestly in regard to paying Suzie’s debt. Alec laughs at him and is going to throw him out. Jack, even though he is a nice guy, has a very bad temper. This often is the situation in the crime genre. Jack becomes extremely angry with Alec laughing at him, and he kills Alec.
Alec’s men come in and Jack tells them he is their new boss. The men don’t like it, but they reserve any action for a later time. Suzie likes the new Jack and wants to be his girl. Suzie is aroused by the violence in Jack and cannot keep her hands off him.
Jack soon becomes more successful than Alec ever was, but he begins to become too egotistical. With his ego getting in the way, Jack makes a mistake when trying to take over a gambling casino. Jack is killed and the men kill Suzie. The most jealous, vindictive, right-hand man in the gang takes over the gambling empire.
Stories in the crime genre are often about people seeking power. Usually, the criminals want control over the city where the story takes place. Generally, they want to be in charge of the drug trade, gambling, liquor (depending upon the year), or they want to rise up in the family or gang. There are always periods of violent action with the protagonist trying to reach his/her goal.
Second situation: Jack is a police detective in a large city like New York City or Los Angeles. Jack is a hardworking, honest detective. He is dedicated to his job and his partner, Alec. Jack spends most of his free time with Alec and Alec’s family. Alec is murdered. Even though he wasn’t put on the case, because they were partners and friends, Jack spends his free time investigating who murdered Alec. During his investigation he meets Suzie. Suzie knew Alec and considered him a friend. Suzie asks if she can help with looking into the murder. Jack, after some convincing, agrees.
Suzie and Jack start to become close during the investigation, and Jack falls in love with her. This is often a foreshadowing as to how the story is going to end. After a few dead ends and blocked paths in the investigation, Jack picks up some information that leads him down an unsuspected path. Jack finds that Suzie was a little more than a friend to Alec, so Suzie has an ulterior motive for assisting Jack. Jack discovers that Suzie murdered Alec and was going to kill Jack, too. Jack arrests Suzie for Alec’s murder.
These are the elements and formats of the crime genre. The crime can be different than murder. Crimes encompass a wide variety of different actions. The main characters do not have to be crime bosses or police detectives, but they generally have a similar background. Very seldom do they lead a life like a factory worker or office employee. This is one reason why the crime genre is so popular. People want to watch characters that lead exciting lives different from theirs.
The stories in the crime genre are similar to the aforementioned two examples where the crime is more than a speeding ticket and provides an interesting and exciting story. The plot can be an inner conflict, once again, of the protagonist, and the setting is usually in the United States or Europe in modern times.
Western Genre
Because of the similarities between the Western and crime genres, I have included back-to-back discussions of the two genres.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Western simply as “of or relating to the American West.” Keeping this in mind, we will begin by discussing the setting.
The setting provides the major difference between the crime genre and the Western genre. Instead of the characters and story occurring in the 1930s or the 1990s, the time for a Western is in the early to late 19th century or anytime through the 1820s to 1890s. Once the 20th century arrives, except for the beginning years, the feeling of the Old West is gone, which brings up the other aspect of the setting that defines the Western genre. The Western genre takes place in the West. Depending upon the year, the West could be Ohio in the 1820s, Missouri in the 1850s, or Nevada in the 1880s.
The main character or protagonist is an individualist, who rides into town for a specific reason, or he may run into trouble while in town, or he may be hired to do something like blaze a trail West. The characters and the stories are straightforward. The interest is the developing story and the action-filled problems that the protagonist faces as he tries to accomplish what he set out to do.
The plot can still be one of inner conflict as the protagonist tries to accomplish the specific goal, quell the trouble in town, or overcome the obstacles of nature as the main character blazes the trail West.
An example of the Western genre has Jack being the individualist, loner riding into town. He has come to town to avenge the death of his partner. Outside of the setting, the same type of character and story could be used in the crime genre. While Jack begins to ask questions about what happened to his partner, he falls into the middle of a range war; a typical Western story, between two ranches over the grazing rights of land. Alec owns the one ranch, and Suzie (a woman) owns the other, which is a rarity in the West.
Jack gets to know Suzie as his inquiries continue. He begins a relationship with her. During the relationship, Jack gives Suzie a helping hand in the range war. Alec is totally evil, underhanded, and despicable in his actions. Westerns, even more contemporary ones, have an outright bad person like Alec. You can see this in crime genre movies also.
Jack defeats Alec in the range war, and in the process, finds that Alec also killed Jack’s partner. In the Old West, there can only be one climax to the story. Jack and Alec shoot it out; Alec is killed, and Jack and Suzie fall in love.
War Genre
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines war as “a state or period of fighting between countries or groups.” With this definition being direct, we can discuss the genre in the same manner. The war genre is straightforward because the movie is very limited in its parameters.
The setting and the year is very specific regarding the year and the location. If the movie takes place from the United States’ perspective, World War I would be from 1917 to 1918; World War II would be from 1941 to 1945; and the Korean Conflict, Vietnam War, Desert Storm, and other Middle East conflicts follow the same procedure. The locations would be an area where the war occurred or in the United States to concentrate on how the home front was coping.
The plot is the inner conflict with dealing with war. The characters and story are based on a battle, trying to obtain overall victory at some point of the war, dealing with losing, dealing with death, dealing with fighting, being a prisoner, or coping at the home front or a location where the fighting is not taking place.
World War II encompasses the war genre. Jack is a soldier, who is a married teacher with two children. He is drafted by the United States shortly after World War II started late in 1941. Jack was told by his wife, Suzie, not to volunteer for any extra missions so he could come home alive to his family when the war is over. Of course, this is not going to be true because a war movie has to have a daring mission.
After being in Europe for about a year and losing many battles, Jack becomes frustrated because he knows the war is not going to end soon. Suzie dreads each day because of the emptiness in her life without Jack. To her, each day never appears to end. She is stressed because she has a continuous challenge to make ends meet.
Jack and seven other men are given a chance to go on a dangerous mission to blow up a German stronghold and capture a high-ranking German officer. These men are asked to go on this mission because of their intelligence and personalities. If they succeed in this mission, the war will likely be over quicker than expected, because of the information they will receive from this German officer. Jack remembers that his wife told him never to volunteer, but he knows he only has once choice. He volunteers. Suzie gets a feeling of foreboding and is suddenly afraid something bad is going to happen. She starts to become distant to her friends and even her children.
Jack goes on the mission. Everything is timed perfectly. The fortress is blown up and the German officer is captured. However, the trip back to the Allied lines did not go as planned. Half the men are killed, Jack is wounded, and the German officer is killed.
Suzie’s feeling of foreboding becomes so great that, at one point, she passes out with anxiety. The Christmas holidays are near, and Suzie is persuaded to take the children to church. As the service begins, Jack walks into the church and joins Suzie and the children. The story ends happily, but with a cost. In order to give the story a more realistic feel, the protagonist is not totally successful with what he had set out to do.
Spy Genre
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines spy as “to watch secretly usually for hostile purposes” or “to search or look for intensively.” I want to give two short definitions to emphasize the spy genre because it is a combination of watching and searching, but I do not want it to get confused with the next genre of adventure.
The spy genre sounds like it could cross over to the previous genres already discussed. But only the setting and the plot can be standard. The setting could be the same as the war, Western, or crime genres, but it does not make it a war, Western, or crime genre. You have to remember that the story makes the genre because it controls everything else.
In the spy genre, the main character generally works under an assumed identity in order to find something or destroy something of harm controlled by a nemesis. As in past genres, the plot is the inner conflict of the protagonist. In this situation, he or she has a strong inner conflict to succeed at what he or she is assigned to act upon.
Thus, if the movie has any of the aforementioned characteristics but takes place during World War II, the movie is primarily a spy movie rather than a war movie. Remember, the setting does not determine the genre but the story does. The story is interconnected to the characters and the plot. The setting helps add the must-needed background and specificity to the movie, but it is not as interconnected as the other three genres.
In recent times, a male of the strong virile type plays the protagonist spy. So, we will demonstrate that this does not always have to be that way in a movie. We will take a woman, named Suzie, who is the spy protagonist. We will set the example during World War II. Unlike Jack in the war genre discussion, Suzie is chosen because of her background in languages and her photographic memory, giving her the ability to memorize lists of facts immediately. She is requested to go behind enemy lines as a civilian and obtain data that will debilitate the enemy thus giving the Allies the advantage and shortening the war by possibly years.
In order to be able to do this, and to prepare her mentally for the task, she is set to train for three weeks with an Army officer named Jack. Jack is very skeptical that Suzie will be able to pull the task off. Jack states that it is not because she is a woman, but the movie viewers know that her being a woman is exactly the reason.
Jack begins a rigorous training program just to say that he told her so. However, Suzie really masters everything Jack throws at her. After about a week, Jack sees this and starts to admire her strength and fortitude. Jack makes the training less rigorous because he only trains her to get behind enemy lines, get back to the Allied lines, and how to mentally survive torture. By the end of the three weeks, they begin to fall in love with each other, and Jack feels he should accompany her, but his command says that is impossible.
The time has arrived for Suzie to go. The French underground has managed to get her a clerical job where she can do some travelling including going to Normandy. Rather abruptly, Suzie plans a trip to Normandy. She studies the land and is able to secretly catch a glimpse of German maps showing where their military strength is in and around Normandy. Suzie rushes and gets the information off to the Allies before she is captured by the Germans. The Allies receive Suzie’s information, but they cannot help Suzie. The Germans find her guilty of being a spy and she is executed.
Can you see the difference between this example and the war genre example? Both have the same setting of World War II, but the spy genre example has a non-soldier searching for secret information, while the war genre had a group of soldiers going on a mission that was not secret. The war mission was behind enemy lines and in the war zone where the fighting was occurring. The spy genre does not occur in the war zone where there was fighting.
Do you see the differences in the stories?
The spy story has a lot less emotion and love between the main characters. The spy story has more suspense as Suzie is hunting for information. She is becoming involved in several tight situations where she barely misses getting caught by the Nazis. The war genre story has the one climatic battle that the whole conflict was moving toward.
Most of the time these two genres do not become this similar but these two examples make it easier to see the differences in the two genres.
Adventure Genre
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines adventure as “an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks” that is “an exciting or remarkable experience.” From this definition, you can see that adventure is an action movie that overlaps with the spy genre with danger, risks, and excitement.
Both the adventure and spy genres can have exotic settings. The stories are normally about a person or group of people searching for something. During the journey of searching, dangerous situations are overcome by the main characters. The protagonist may end up getting involved in fighting to overcome social or moral injustices in the exotic location where he or she has journeyed.
The difference between this genre and the spy genre is, once again, the story. The spy genre has a story where something is searched for secretively, and the information itself contains secret information. This story has suspense based on timing and near misses.
The adventure genre’s suspense is found in the action and the chance that the protagonist may get killed without the espionage. The protagonist is an adventurer rather than a government employee.
Being bigger than life, the adventure genre contains a lot of explosive action throughout the movie. Remember that the story treatment, character background, and character development are big differentiations and distinctions that separate genres. The plot and the setting are also different between genres, and are reflective of the story and the types of characters.
Science Fiction Genre
Science fiction is linked to the previous genres of crime, Westerns, war, spy, and adventure by the basic theme. However, the genre elements are totally different.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines science fiction as “fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component.” An example of science fiction is time travel, which has and is a popular topic.
Quite often, science fiction has a setting that takes place in the future. In this way, if the producer wants to comment on a particular problem in current society, the producer can set the problem in the future. The producer appears critical about the problem but not about the current society. The outcome of that problem, if it continues, shows how the future will look.
For science fiction, we can still stay with the plot of inner conflict, which can always be the plot, because a conflict is needed. The characters and the story can be the same as any other genre with variations, as we will demonstrate in the example.
In our example, Jack and Suzie, along with several hundred other people, are fed up with the crime and violence that exists where they live. No specific location is mentioned, so it can be anywhere in the world or universe.
In this movie, many of Jack and Suzies’ group are engineers who work endlessly to build several space ships that to travel to a new galaxy, away from the crime and chaos. Researchers in this group toil endlessly to find a new galaxy that is livable for humans. Together they all dream of pioneering and developing this new world so there is no violence and everyone can live in harmony.
By seeing the people’s action of building space ships, the audience learns that the time is the future.
The space ships are finally finished and they are sent off. They find and arrive in the new world that is named New Earth. The people set up a colony and draft laws so there is no anarchy. Everything is great for two generations. The people live in harmony and enjoy each day to the utmost.
However, one day, someone is found dead and robbed. Everyone is left shocked. Because so much time has passed without violence, the police are unprepared. But they review the crime scene, and conclude that it was murder.
Since they have never investigated a murder, they are unsure what should they do to find the murderer and how should they to go about doing it. They arrive at a procedure and find the murderer. The murder was an accident. The murderer was surprised as everyone else. The people realize a murder or accidental death can always happen, so the society has to be prepared and set up to handle it. Even though the story is fantastical in many ways, it can still make comments and raise questions about society and morality.
Science fiction genre, like any genre, can cross over at some point or points to another genre. This example crossed over to the crime genre. However, to determine the main genre, review the story, characters, plot, and setting together. In this situation, these elements are most geared toward the science fiction genre.
Fantasy Genre
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines fantasy as “something that is produced by the imagination: an idea about doing something that is far removed from normal reality.”
In other words, a fantasy movie has no limits. The setting could be anywhere at any time with characters who appear and act in any way the script writer wants. The story could be about anything. So let’s stick with one constant, the plot. The plot will be inner conflict.
According to Wikipedia, fantasy stays away from scientific and macabre story aspects, so it does not become a piece of science fiction or horror. You can see how all three genres: science fiction, fantasy, and horror are similar but different.
What would a fantasy example be like?
A group of misfits are given a task by a wizard to find the perfect person. They must do this in order to save their friend, who is terminally ill and will die shortly. The wizard tells them that their friend is not terminally ill but under an evil spell that he can break. The perfect person is the wizard’s fee for breaking the spell. The characters are Jack, Suzie, and Alec, who are misfits because they are the outcasts from their home village, which is in a fictional country. The wizard gives them a clue to look where no one has looked or would think of looking.
Jack, Suzie, and Alec think that the perfect place to find the perfect person is in a graveyard because nobody would think of looking there. But how would the perfect person appear in a graveyard? After searching through several cemeteries, they become frustrated because they find nothing unusual and do not know what the wizard was talking about. They finally find a cemetery where they can enter a new world that is built upon their imaginations. Using their imaginations mean, as they discuss a trait or physical appearance, they can build the person using their minds. What they imagine can become reality.
Using their imaginations, they begin to discuss what the perfect person would look like and act. What would the person’s personality be like? They cannot decide because the traits that they imagined as a perfect person are foreign to them. Finally, they start talking about themselves, and what they like and do not like.
After a lengthy conversation that continues for days, Suzie stands up and yells that she has the answer. She states they should make three lists of their best physical and mental traits. That will be the perfect person. The perfect person is within them as it is within all people. They compile the perfect person using their imaginations and take it to the wizard.
Suzie explains to the wizard with the assistance of Jack and Alec that the perfect person was within them as it is within all people. The wizard states that they found the answer to the clue. As such, they are also able to break the spell over their friend. The spell is broken, and the four leave and live happily ever after.
You are only limited by your imagination. A wonderful theme can come from any genre.
Horror Genre
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines horror as “the quality of something that causes feelings of fear, dread, and shock: the horrible or shocking quality or character of something.” A horror show is “something that is difficult to deal with or watch because it is so bad, unpleasant, etc.”
The setting regarding where the movie takes place can be instrumental in a horror movie. Many times, horror movies take place in a historical area with big, old houses that hold many secrets. Secrets provide the basis of a story as the house is supposedly haunted because something gruesome happened there many years ago. However, the setting may not be unusual, but it can be a typical small town or city just like the one where you live.
The plot, once again, is inner conflict. The main character, Suzie, inherits the house, and she is determined—to the point of becoming obsessed—to prove that there is no such thing as a haunted house. However, she takes her boyfriend, Jack, with her to the house. After they become frightened by unearthly occurrences in the house, Jack asks his friend, Alec, to join them at the house to find a solution to what is going on.
Alec states that in order to make it a clean, healthy house again, they have to discover the problem and solve it. In order to do this, Alec recommends doing a séance. The three of them enter a room late in the evening and try to contact a spirit to identify the problem. They find, at one point, that the house was owned by a slave trader or human trafficker. Down in the basement, many bodies were buried.
Suzie cannot stand thinking that a relative was a human trafficker and nothing can really be done to solve this problem. The house was owned by an evil man who is suffering in the spirit world because of his past actions. Jack thinks that the only cure to these past heinous actions is to burn the house down, which would cremate the bodies that were buried in the basement and possibly put them at peace.
Suzie does not agree with that action, but Alec agrees with Jack in order to find a cure for the haunting. Possibly, after the burning, Suzie can build a different house. Suzie starts to act in an irrational manner, like she is becoming her past relative, who was the slaver. Alec and Jack burn the house. Suzie becomes completely enraged and has to be restrained until the house is completely burned down.
Once the house has finished burning, Suzie no longer acts like she is possessed. The whole area becomes quiet. Suzie speculates that they just need drive away from it. The three of them drive away.
The horror genre brings fear, and fear generally brings thrills and suspense. With a suspenseful scene, people like to scare themselves. The theme can always be “search for the truth,” rather than “do not be afraid of the unknown.”
Drama Genre
If a movie does not fit in one of the aforementioned genre categories, then it is a drama.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines drama as “a play, movie, television show, or radio show that is about a serious subject and is not meant to make the audience laugh” and “a composition in verse or prose intended to portray life or character or to tell a story usually involving conflicts and emotions through action and dialogue.”
The four elements of the drama genre have to be serious, portray life, tell a story, and the characters have to have an inner conflict that brings out emotions at different times throughout the story. These are all points that we have been discussing with the other genres. The characters and the story are general, like everyday people and situations.
Somebody is dying, something has to be obtained, or something has to be accomplished are the three common stories for dramas. Jack is an accomplished musician, who is going to be playing at Carnegie Hall, and he finds out that he has a fatal illness after passing out during a rehearsal. Or, Jack lived in the slums and a teacher noticed something in him that could be cultivated. Jack becomes a renowned doctor, scientist, or mathematician. The movie covers Jack’s obstacles to achieve what is necessary for him to being on the road toward a renowned career.
Or, Suzie risks everything to find a cure for a disease that is killing many thousands of people on a Caribbean island. The viewer often knows what is going to happen but often the characters and their development is what makes a drama interesting.
The story is relatively simple, the plot is inner conflict, and the setting is inconsequential because the characters make the movie.
Did you find Cyrano de Bergerac to be a drama? Cyrano de Bergerac had a firm foundation in unrequited love, a very romantic element in the story. But Cyrano’s inner conflict of his feelings of inadequacies in his personal appearance, while being overconfident in other areas, present love in a dramatic genre.
Action, Thriller, Suspense Thriller, Biography, Film Noir, Neo Noir, and Mystery
Action, thriller, suspense-thriller, biography, film noir, neo noir, and mystery are terms that are often referred to as different genres. However, none of these are genres. They do not contain just the four basic elements of a genre—no matter how much people insist that they do. They contain the genre elements and other elements, like cinematography, that are not part of a genre.
Writers, educators, critics, historians, and others have stated that the above terms developed into being named a genre and that they can be accepted as a genre over time. How many of you heard or read the terms action genre, film noir genre, or suspense thriller genre? Just because they have been referred to by these terms, over the years, does not make them honorary genres. These terms, by themselves, still have the same meaning even if they have been named genres.
Most of these terms refer to specific cinematography when shooting the movie, or they refer to the way the movie was edited.
Action, thrillers, and suspense thrillers all have similar types of action in them. Adventure, spy, crime, war, and Westerns could all be action movies or thrillers or suspense thrillers. Action, thrillers, and suspense thrillers do not touch upon the four elements that make up a genre.
Film noir and neo noir are predominantly crime movies that have certain cinematography. They overlap both in the construction and production aspects of making a movie.
Film noir means “black film.” Film noir has many scenes occurring at night with many gritty, seedy city shots. The character types in film noir are loners and schemers, but they are reflective of the types of characters in crime movies.
Detour is a good example of film noir regarding the characters like Al and Vera. The voice-over narration of the protagonist describing the forward action, using black and white film, and many scenes occurring at night are examples of film noir. But voice-over narration, being in black and white, and a lot of the movie occurring at night does not determine the genre. The jaded characters, story, and plot of murder defines the movie as a member of the crime genre. The night scenes and voice-over narration are a directorial style. These decisions are characteristics that distinguish it as film noir.
Neo noir is the new noir for the later 20th and 21st centuries when most movies are made in color. The genres could be crime, science fiction, or drama but the cinematography is dark, gritty, and symbolic, similar in many respects to film noir.
Mystery refers to the way the story is shaped. Most mysteries are concerned with who stole something or who murdered someone. Most mysteries belong to the crime genre where the story and the editing keep the audience guessing until the final minutes of the movie.
Biography refers to a nonfiction movie that is about a historical or living person. The background, character, and setting of the movie may determine what other genre a biography might belong to. If the person is a war hero, the movie would be of the war genre; if the person was a criminal or detective, the movie would fit the crime genre, and so forth.
Documentary
Documentary, according to Dictionary.com, refers to movies and television features based on or re-creating an actual event, era, life story, etc., that purports to be factually accurate and contains no fictional elements.
Sheila Curran Bernard, author of Documentary Storytelling, defines documentaries as:
Documentaries bring viewers into new worlds and experiences through the presentation of factual information about real people, places, and events, generally — but not always — portrayed through the use of actual images and artifacts. But factuality alone does not define documentary films; it’s what the filmmaker does with those factual elements, weaving them into an overall narrative that strives to be as compelling as it is truthful and is often greater than the sum of its parts.
From these two definitions, documentaries are a separate movie entity that is unto itself.
Final Thought
We covered a lot of area in discussing different genres. Even though genres are only considered labels for movies, the four elements of a genre are the basis of any movie. Besides categorizing, genres indirectly shape the movie’s characters and story.
Character, story, plot, and setting are how a movie is constructed. From this construction, the specific theme that is created by the screenwriter and the director can be realized and understood by the viewer.
The other chapters in the construction of a movie go into more detail and dissect these elements in order for a better understanding of the scope of these elements and how the theme of the movie is realized.
Further Viewing
With the completion of this chapter, the movies to watch that that are excellent examples of different genres are: | |||||||
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"Tom Eames"
] | 2024-03-11T08:21:39+00:00 | Since silent films became 'talkies', music wasn't far behind. For over 100 years, movie songs and soundtracks have been a hugely important part of any Hollywood hit. | en | /assets_v4r/smooth/img/favicon-16x16.png | Smooth | https://www.smoothradio.com/features/top-songs/best-movie-songs-soundtracks-ranked/ | All Saints - 'Pure Shores' (The Beach)
All Saints - Pure Shores (Official Music Video)
A huge UK number one single in 2000, All Saints recorded the main theme tune to this Leonardo DiCaprio film.
Probably the best thing about the film, it's still a fantastic summery pop tune over two decades later.
Wilson Phillips - 'Hold On' (Bridesmaids)
Wilson Phillips Wedding Performance | Bridesmaids | Screen Bites
In one of cinema's most rousing endings, the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids gave a new lease of life to 1990's biggest hit from American trio Wilson Phillips.
In the film, the characters played by Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph fondly recall the song from their teenage years.
The Story of... 'Hold On' by Wilson Phillips
Wilson Phillips then make an appearance to sing the song at the wedding at the conclusion of the film.
Tom Petty - 'Free Fallin'' (Jerry Maguire)
Tom Cruise singing (Jerry Maguire, 1996)
We love this moment where Tom Cruise's titular character in Jerry Maguire finally has a bit of good news, and sings out his feelings while listening to this Tom Petty classic on the radio.
Sixpence None the Richer - 'Kiss Me' (She's All That)
She's All That • Kiss Me • Sixpence None the Richer
While not written specifically for the teen romcom, 'Kiss Me' was used as the film's main theme, and gave it a brand new lease of life.
Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil Kim and Mya - 'Lady Marmalade' (Moulin Rouge)
Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya, Pink - Lady Marmalade (Official Music Video)
There are plenty of brilliant music moments from Baz Luhrmann's extravaganza, but it doesn't get much more epic than this team-up of 2001's biggest pop divas.
Lulu - To Sir With Love (To Sir With Love)
To Sir, with Love • Theme Song • Lulu
The teenage Lulu scored a number one hit in the USA with this sentimental song.
It was the title track of the Sidney Poitier film about social and racial issues at an inner city UK school in the 1960s.
Michael Sembello - 'Maniac' (Flashdance)
Michael Sembello - Maniac (1983) (Official Video)
Originally intended as a horror movie song, it was later reworked perfectly as a song to play while Jennifer Beals trained hard at home, it became a big '80s pop hit for Michael.
Eminem - 'Lose Yourself' (8 Mile)
Eminem - Lose Yourself [HD]
Eminem's autobiographical movie was a resounding success for the rapper, helped largely to this main song from the film.
While largely spelling out the plot of the film, it has also become something of an anthem relating to taking your moment and challenging yourself.
Sonny & Cher - 'I Got You Babe' (Groundhog Day)
I Got You, Babe - Groundhog Day
OK, Bill Murray may have grown to hate this song thanks to his character Phil constantly hearing it every time he woke up, but it's now an iconic movie song because of his suffering. Sorry, Phil.
Gary Jules and Michael Andrews - 'Mad World' (Donnie Darko)
Donnie Darko - Mad World
In a film full of '80s classics, it was an inspired move to record a piano cover of Tears for Fears' brilliant song 'Mad World' for the powerful finale.
Two years later, it was the UK's surprise Christmas number one after a new single release, and it remains one of cinema's most moving music moments.
Pharrell Williams - 'Happy' (Despicable Me 2)
HAPPY - Pharrell Williams (feat. Minions)
A ridiculously uplifting and catchy song, Pharrell Williams had a massive hit with the animated comedy sequel's main song.
Pharrell wrote and recorded the film's entire soundtrack, bringing back the days of big animated films recruiting top music names.
Fred Astaire - 'The Way You Look Tonight' (Swing Time)
The Way You Look Tonight
One of the most romantic ballads of all time, this song first appeared in the 1936 musical comedy Swing Time.
The song earned an Academy Award, and has since been performed countless times by everybody from Phil Collins to Rod Stewart.
Doris Day - 'Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will be)' (The Man Who Knew Too Much)
Doris Day - Que Sera Sera
One of those songs that became so big that it's easy to forget that it first appeared in a film.
Doris Day performed the classic song in an Alfred Hitchcock film, no less. It became her signature song, and won an Oscar.
Prince - 'Purple Rain' (Purple Rain)
Prince - Purple Rain (Official Video)
We'd argue that this song is more famous as a song in its own right rather than being from a film, but we're counting it anyway!
Prince was arguably at his peak when he made the Purple Rain film in 1984, with this legendary song becoming his signature tune.
Will Smith - 'Men in Black' (Men in Black)
Will Smith - Men In Black (Video Version)
Will Smith was the '90s king when it came to recording theme songs for films he was also starring.
His best was the theme tune to sci-fi comedy Men in Black, which managed to explain the plot of the film and be catchy.
Barbra Streisand - 'The Way We Were' (The Way We Were)
Barbra Streisand - The Way We Were
Barbra Streisand's career was arguably revived thanks to the success of this song from the film of the same name, in which she also starred.
A huge hit single, it won two Academy Awards.
Billy Ocean - 'When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going' (The Jewel of the Nile)
The Story of... 'When the Going Gets Tough' by Billy Ocean
British pop legend Billy Ocean was recruited by Hollywood to perform the main theme tune to adventure flick The Jewel of the Nile starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
As Billy explained to Smooth, Michael, Kathleen and Danny DeVito even popped up to star in Billy's music video!
Lionel Richie and Diana Ross - 'Endless Love' (Endless Love)
Diana Ross & Lionel Richie Endless Love 1981
This is definitely one of those songs that was a bigger deal than the movie it was from.
Brooke Shields starred in the romantic drama of the same name in 1981, but the most memorable part of the film will always be the stunning duet from two of pop's biggest stars: Lionel Richie and Diana Ross.
Peter Gabriel - 'In Your Eyes' (Say Anything)
Say Anything • In Your Eyes • Peter Gabriel
A perfect example of how a film could bring a new lease of life to a song.
An iconic scene from this 1989 film featured broken-hearted Lloyd (John Cusack) serenading his ex-girlfriend outside her bedroom window by holding a boombox up above his head and playing the Peter Gabriel song for her.
Harry Nilsson - 'Everybody's Talkin'' (Midnight Cowboy)
Midnight Cowboy - Harry Nilsson - Everybody's Talkin'
Harry Nilsson was recommended for the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack to director John Schlesinger, who then selected this song.
The track was used as the theme song for the Jon Voigt and Dustin Hoffman movie, and would become closely identified with it from then on.
BJ Thomas - 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head' (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)
B. J. Thomas - Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head (Stereo / Lyrics)
This song was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, describing somebody who overcomes their troubles by realizing that "it won't be long 'till happiness steps up to greet me."
The single topped the US chart and won an Oscar for Best Original Song.
Isaac Hayes - 'Theme from Shaft (Shaft)
Isaac Hayes - Theme From Shaft (1971)
Future South Park star Isaac Hayes created one of funk's finest moments for the main theme for the 1971 drama.
Hayes became the first African American to win the Best Original Song Oscar – or any Academy Award in a non-acting category.
Elton John - 'Tiny Dancer' (Almost Famous)
Almost Famous - Tiny Dancer
In 2000, Elton John's seminal song 'Tiny Dancer' was used in a prominent scene in Cameron Crowe's music drama Almost Famous.
The scene helped the song gain a new legion of fans, and it returned to Hollywood after being used in the Elton biopic Rocket Man.
Bing Crosby - 'White Christmas' (Holiday Inn)
Bing Crosby - White Christmas (1950).avi
It's the world's best-selling song of all time, and a staple of Christmas since the 1940s.
The Story of... 'White Christmas'
Because of the song's iconic status, it has kept Bing's film on our screens every December, alongside its spiritual follow-up movie of the same name.
Gladys Knight - 'Licence to Kill' (Licence to Kill)
Gladys Knight - License to Kill
For Timothy Dalton's final (and best) turn as James Bond, the Empress of Soul Gladys Knight was recruited to perform its title track.
It's an underrated Bond theme, and one that perfectly brings together 007's mood and '80s pomp.
Queen - 'Bohemian Rhapsody' (Wayne's World)
Bohemian Rhapsody Wayne's World HD
Decades before the Freddie Mercury biopic of the same name was released with huge success, Queen's most famous song was used in what would become an iconic movie moment.
The Story of... 'Bohemian Rhapsody'
1990s comedy Wayne's World saw Wayne, Garth and the boys headbang it out to Brian May's guitar work, with great comic effect.
Roy Orbison - 'Oh, Pretty Woman' (Pretty Woman)
Pretty Woman - Oh, Pretty Woman (Roy Orbison) ᴴᴰ
Roy Orbison's signature tune was already a famous hit around the world for decades before it was used in the title of the 1990 Julia Roberts and Richard Gere romcom.
Pretty Woman: The cute story of how Julia Roberts convinced Richard Gere to take the role
It helped revitalise Roy's career, especially when the film used the song itself as part of the soundtrack.
Noel Harrison - 'The Windmills of Your Mind' (The Thomas Crown Affair)
The Windmills of Your Mind - Noel Harrison
A quirky song sung in a non-conventional manner by Noel Harrison, this '60s thriller theme tune remains one of the best of its era.
Originally a French song, the reworked version won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1969.
Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle - 'A Whole New World' (Aladdin)
A Whole New World - Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle
This ballad was written by Alan Menken, with lyrics by Tim Rice. A duet was originally recorded by singers Brad Kane and Lea Salonga in their roles as the singing voices of Aladdin and Jasmine.
The track is both the film's love and theme song, and describes Aladdin showing the confined princess a life of freedom while riding on a magic carpet. The song won an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1993.
The 30 greatest Disney songs of all time, ranked
A single version of the song was released, performed by American singers Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle. This version is played over the film's end credits and was a hit around the world.
Joni Mitchell - 'Both Sides Now' (Love Actually)
Love Actually - Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now
Of all of Love Actually's music moments (a nod goes out to 'God Only Knows'), this one has to be the most memorable.
The Story of... 'Both Sides Now'
In a heartbreaking scene after Emma Thompson's character has discovered her husband (Alan Rickman) had been cheating on her, she has a private and dignified cry before having to stay stoic for the sake of her family, all while Joni Mitchell's 2000 version of her heartbreaking ballad.
Louis Armstrong - 'We Have All the Time in the World'
Louis Armstrong - We have all the Time in the World
This was the secondary - but more well known - theme tune for George Lazenby's single outing as Bond.
The Story of... 'We Have All the Time in the World'
An ageing Louis Armstrong was the surprise but perfect choice for this ballad, and was chosen by John Barry because he felt he could "deliver the title line with irony". The title line is taken from Bond's final and emotional quote in the movie.
It returned to great effect in Daniel Craig's final outing No Time To Die, marking the first time a theme was used more than once in two different movies.
Trisha Yearwood - 'How Do I Live' (Con Air)
How do i live without you - Trisha Yearwood
Weirdly, both LeAnn Rimes and Trisha Yearwood released the country power ballad 'How Do I Live' at the exact same time in 1997.
While LeAnn's version is the more well known, it was actually Trisha's version that was used in the Nicolas Cage action romp Con Air.
It was a rather surprising song to choose for such an explosive movie, but it somehow worked.
Phil Oakey & Giorgio Moroder - 'Together in Electric Dreams' (Electric Dreams)
Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder - Together in Electric Dreams (Official Video)
This '80s synthpop staple was another song that ended up more famous and popular than the film it was from.
The Electric Dreams film's finest quality was its soundtrack, which was headed up by this fantastic tune.
Irene Cara - 'Fame' (Fame)
Irene Cara - Fame Theme Song
Before Flashdance, Irene Cara was hired to record the theme tune for the 1980 musical film Fame.
It was Irene's debut single, and it won the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Original Song.
Kermit the Frog - 'The Rainbow Connection' (The Muppet Movie)
Rainbow Connection by Kermit the Frog from The Muppet Movie
This sweet little ditty was performed by Jim Henson as Kermit the Frog for the Muppets' 1979 film adventure.
In 2020, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry.
David Bowie - 'Underground' (Labyrinth)
Labyrinth | Underground (David Bowie) Remastered Version
David Bowie was recruited by Jim Henson to lead the cast of the fantasy '80s film Labyrinth, and that meant that he also recorded a fantastic soundtrack.
This was the film's main theme song that played at the beginning of the film, with Bowie releasing a different version as a single.
Starship - 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now' (Mannequin)
Starship - Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now (Official Music Video)
Pop-rock veterans Starship provided this '80s anthem as the main theme song to romantic comedy Mannequin in 1987, and it's still a banger.
Not only was it a number one hit around the world, but it was nominated for an Oscar.
Coolio - 'Gangsta's Paradise' (Dangerous Minds)
Coolio - Gangsta's Paradise (feat. L.V.) [Official Music Video]
The 1995 movie Dangerous Minds might not have had a lasting legacy, but its main theme from rapper Coolio and singer LV very much has.
Sampling Stevie Wonder, the huge-selling single also featured an appearance from the film's main star Michelle Pfieffer.
Stevie Wonder - 'I Just Called to Say I Love You' (The Woman in Red)
Stevie Wonder - I Just Called To Say I Love You (Music Video)
Speaking of Stevie, the music legend recorded this simple but effective ballad for the soundtrack of The Woman in Red in 1984.
It became the best-selling single of Stevie's career, and won the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Song.
Randy Newman - 'You've Got a Friend in Me' (Toy Story)
You've Got A Friend In Me - Randy Newman (Toy Story Edition)
Randy Newman wrote and performed this litty tune, which would become the main theme for all the Toy Story films.
The song is played during the opening credits for Toy Story, Toy Story 3, and Toy Story 4, focusing on the importance of Woody and Andy in the first film, and for all his toys in the third and fourth.
The song was nominated for both the Academy Award for Best Original Song and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, but lost both to 'Colors of the Wind' from Disney's Pocahontas.
Ben E King - 'Stand By Me' (Stand By Me)
Ben E. King - Stand By Me (HQ Video Remastered In 1080p)
For the 1986 film of the same name, the Ben E King soul classic found a new lease of life thanks to its use in the film.
Where are the cast of Stand By Me now?
Taking place in the late 1950s, it brought new fans to the film's soundtrack of music from the era.
Faith Hill - 'There You'll Be' (Pearl Harbour)
There You'll Be Official Music Video [with lyrics]
Following the success of Michael Bay's Armageddon, he followed the trick of releasing a power ballad for his next action romance: Pearl Harbor.
Here, country superstar Faith Hill was recruited to perform the film's main theme tune that crossed over into the pop charts.
Roxette - 'It Must Have Been Love' (Pretty Woman)
Roxette - It Must Have Been Love (Official Music Video)
Originally a Christmas song, the festive references were removed as Roxette recorded a new version for the Pretty Woman soundtrack.
Its use in the film made the song a massive international hit, and turned Roxette into pop legends.
Ray Parker Jr - 'Ghostbusters' (Ghostbusters)
Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters was bound to always a be a big box office hit. But we'd argue it probably wouldn't have been anywhere near as big without Ray Parker Jr's catchy juggernaut of a theme tune.
It was nominated for an Oscar, but lost out to Stevie Wonder's track above.
Marilyn Monroe - 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
Marilyn Monroe Diamonds are a girl's best friend
A truly iconic cinematic moment, here's Marilyn Monroe at her peak, seductively singing about exploiting men for riches.
Her performance has been parodied and referenced by various stars ever since, ranging from Madonna to Kylie Minogue.
Steppenwolf - 'Born to Be Wild' (Easy Rider)
Steppenwolf - Born To Be Wild (Easy Rider) (1969)
The ultimate film and song that summed up the counter-culture movement of the late 1960s, it's impossible not to imagine yourself out for a ride on a motorbike with a stars and stipe helmet on.
Fred Astaire - 'Cheek to Cheek' (Top Hat)
TOP HAT, Mark Sandrich, 1935 - Heaven
This iconic Irving Berlin ballad was nominated for an Oscar and has become a standard since its use back in 1936.
It had a second cinematic highlight after its heartbreaking use in 1999's The Green Mile, and we're tearing up just thinking about it.
Bill Withers - 'Ain't No Sunshine' (Notting Hill)
Ain't No Sunshine | Notting Hill | Screen Bites
Director Richard Curtis made use of this classic Bill Withers soul ballad's short length by using it in a memorable montage scene to showcase the passage of time across a year.
Stealers Wheel - 'Stuck in the Middle with You' (Reservoir Dogs)
"Reservoir Dogs" Best Scene HD
If there's one entry in this list that perfectly explains how a song can forever have a totally different mood after its use in a film, it's probably this one.
Quentin Tarantino picked this classic rock staple to be playing while Michael Madsen got busy with a knife in a gruesome but comedic scene, and cinema history was made.
Goo Goo Dolls - 'Iris' (City of Angels)
City of Angels - "Goo Goo Dolls - Iris"
Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan's 1998 romantic drama City of Angels had a cracking soundtrack: Sarah McLachlan's 'Angel' and Alanis Morissette's 'Uninvited' were also there.
The Story of... 'Iris' by Goo Goo Dolls
But the best has to be this alt-rock power ballad from Goo Goo Dolls, which really should have received an Oscar nomination.
Whitney Houston - 'I Have Nothing' (The Bodyguard)
Whitney Houston - I Have Nothing (Official HD Video)
With 'I Will Always Love You' being such a barnstorming hit, it's easy to forget that there were several other bangers from The Bodyguard.
This was the second-best song from the soundtrack, and became one of Whitney's signature tunes.
Chuck Berry - 'Johnny B Goode' (Back to the Future)
Johnny B. Goode - Back to the Future (9/10) Movie CLIP (1985) HD
OK, technically speaking it was Marty McFly singing this instead of Chuck Berry, but this song will now always be synonymous with the Enchcanted Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future.
Monty Python - 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life' (Life of Brian)
Eric Idle - "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" - STEREO HQ
The Monty Python boys managed to come up with a song that was both hilarious and mellow at the same time, and was the perfect finale scene for their seminal Life of Brian film.
Adele - 'Skyfall' (Skyfall)
Adele - Skyfall (Lyric Video)
Daniel Craig's third outing as James Bond secured the services of pop's biggest star when Adele belted out this stunning theme tune.
All 25 James Bond themes ranked from worst to best
The song won an Oscar, Golden Globe, Grammy and Brit Award. So, it did pretty well.
Audrey Hepburn - 'Moon River' (Breakfast at Tiffany's)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (3/9) Movie CLIP - Moon River (1961) HD
This song performed by Audrey Hepburn won the Oscar for Best Song, as well as two Grammys in 1962.
It would later become the signature song for Andy Williams and has been covered by countless artists.
Phil Collins - 'Against All Odds' (Against All Odds)
Phil Collins Against All Odds (Official Music Video 1984)
You might not remember much about the film it was from (it starred Jeff Bridges, by the way), but Phil Collins' title track from its soundtrack became one of the best-loved power ballads of all time, and one of his biggest hits.
Christina Perri - 'A Thousand Years' (The Twilight Saga - Breaking Dawn Part 1)
Christina Perri - A Thousand Years [Official Music Video]
Love or hate the Twilight movie franchise, you have to say that this love song from Christina Perri is one of the very best from the past decade or so.
Amazingly, it wasn't even nominated for an Oscar.
Bee Gees - 'Night Fever' (Saturday Night Fever)
Saturday Night Fever • Night Fever • Bee Gees
There could have been seven or eight entries from this one film alone.
The Bee Gees became the unexpected Kings of Disco when they were hired to make the soundtrack for this film, and ended up releasing one of the best-selling albums ever.
It just makes you want to grab your comb and run to the dancefloor as soon as you hear it.
John Parr - 'St Elmo's Fire' (St Elmo's Fire)
John Parr - St. Elmo's Fire (Man In Motion) (Official Music Video)
If you're talking trying to shoehorn the film's difficult title into a theme tune and making it work wonders, John Parr is the king.
Berlin - 'Take My Breath Away' (Top Gun)
Berlin - Take My Breath Away (Official Video)
The main love theme from Tom Cruise's Top Gun movie, this power ballad won an Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Song in 1986.
Berlin may have been one hit wonders, but what a hit to have.
West Side Story - 'Somewhere' (West Side Story)
West Side Story (8/10) Movie CLIP - Somewhere (1961) HD
The love theme from the 1961 movie adaptation of West Side Story is a beautiful and heartbreaking cinematic moment. Although Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood played Tony and Maria, they were actually dubbed by Jim Bryant and Marni Nixon.
The song would go on to be covered by many artists ranging from Barbra Streisand to Pet Shop Boys.
Julie Andrews - 'The Sound of Music' (The Sound of Music)
"The Sound of Music" - THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
There's not many more iconic film moments than the sight of Julie Andrews running over the hills (which were very alive) to sing the legendary musical's opening number.
Dick Van Dyke - 'Hushabye Mountain' (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) - Hushabye Mountain Scene (3/12) | Movieclips
Dick Van Dyke may not have been the best at doing British accents, but when it came to singing a beautiful lullaby in a kids' film, he was arguably the best.
Kenny Loggins - 'Danger Zone' (Top Gun)
Kenny Loggins - Danger Zone (Official Video)
The ultimate mid-80s power ballad crafted especially for Hollywood, you just want to grab your shades and feel the need for speed pronto.
John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John - 'Summer Nights' (Grease)
Grease - Summer Nights HD
Grease was certainly the word in 1978, and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John ruled the charts with several massive hits from the soundtrack.
This opening number between the pair and their pals is still a karaoke favourite nearly 50 years later.
Tina Turner - 'We Don't Need Another Hero' (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome)
TINA TURNER ★ We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)【music video】
Not only did Tina Turner star in this Mad Max sequel, but she recorded the main theme tune.
Despite attempting to include 'Thunderdome' within the song's lyrics, it still sounds like a typical catchy Tina Turner anthem that works without the original context.
Peter Cetera - 'The Glory of Love' (The Karate Kid II)
peter cetera - glory of love (Video Official) HD
Former Chicago singer Peter Cetera took his brand of epic '80s love songs for this main theme for The Karate Kid sequel.
It was nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Berlin's 'Take My Breath Away'.
Survivor - 'The Eye of the Tiger' (Rocky III)
Survivor - Eye Of The Tiger (Official HD Video)
Sylvester Stallone originally wanted Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust' as the theme for the third Rocky movie, but the band refused.
Instead, rock band Survivor came up with this '80s rock staple, which was a number one hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Irene Cara - 'Flashdance... What a Feeling!' (Flashdance)
Flashdance • What a Feeling • Irene Cara
When you think of '80s cinema moments, the sight of Jennifer Beals swapping her welding gear for a seriously epic dance routine to the tune of 'What a Feeling' in Flashdance is right up there.
Irene Cara's anthem won an Oscar and Golden Globe for best song in 1984.
Shirley Bassey - 'Goldfinger' (Goldfinger)
Goldfinger Theme Song - James Bond
This was the song that made James Bond's theme music come alive. In the first two movies, they were something of an after thought, but Shirley's theme tune to 'Goldfinger' went POW!
Co-written by crooner Anthony Newley, the song was inspired by 'Mack the Knife' and was produced by Beatles legend George Martin.
Elton John - 'Can You Feel the Love Tonight' (The Lion King)
Elton John - Can You Feel the Love Tonight (From "The Lion King"/Official Video)
This love ballad won Elton John and Tim Rice an Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Original Song in 1995.
The song was performed in the film by Kristle Edwards, Joseph Williams, Sally Dworsky, Nathan Lane, and Ernie Sabella, with Elton recording another version in the film's closing credits.
Bonus fact: Backing vocals were provided by Gary Barlow, Rick Astley and Kiki Dee!
Cliff Edwards - 'When You Wish Upon a Star' (Pinocchio)
When You Wish Upon A Star - sung by Jiminy Cricket (Cliff Edwards)
The original version of this ballad was sung by Cliff Edwards in the character of Jiminy Cricket, and is heard over the opening credits and in the final scene of Pinocchio.
It won the 1940 Academy Award for Best Original Song. It was also the first Disney song to win an Oscar.
In the 1980s, 'When You Wish Upon a Star' became the signature song of The Walt Disney Company, and is still used in its production logos at the beginning of many Disney films.
Christopher Cross - 'Arthur's Theme' (Arthur)
Christopher Cross - Arthur's Theme
This was the main theme for the 1981 film Arthur starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli. It won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1981, and was a number one hit in the US.
It was written in collaboration between Cross, pop legend Burt Bacharach, and Bacharach's frequent writing partner and then-wife Carole Bayer Sager.
Bruce Springsteen - 'Streets of Philadelphia' (Philadelphia)
Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philadelphia (Official Video)
This Oscar-winning song was written for the 1993 movie Philadelphia starring Tom Hanks, an early mainstream film dealing with HIV/AIDS.
In early 1993, director Jonathan Demme asked Springsteen to write a song for the in-progress film, and by June, he had done so. Demme wanted people not familiar with HIV to see his film.
He felt Springsteen and fellow soundtrack contributor Neil Young would bring an audience that would not ordinarily see a movie about a gay man dying of AIDS. It is Springsteen’s biggest hit in the UK.
Wet Wet Wet - 'Love is All Around' (Four Weddings and a Funeral)
Wet Wet Wet - Love Is All Around (Official Video)
Director Richard Curtis approached the band to record a cover of this Troggs song, and it ended up becoming one of the biggest hits in UK chart history.
The Story of... 'Love is All Around'
It spent 15 weeks at the top of the charts in 1994, with Marti Pellow later saying: "We did everybody's head in the summer of 1994.
"I still think it's a brilliant record. Its strength is its sheer simplicity. Any band would give their eye teeth to have a hit record like that. I'm very proud of it."
Patrick Swayze - 'She's Like the Wind' (Dirty Dancing)
Patrick Swayze - She's Like The Wind ft. Wendy Fraser
In a true one-off moment, Dirty Dancing's male lead Patrick Swayze co-wrote and performed this stunning ballad, and then never really did anything like it since.
The song helped the movie's soundtrack sales soar, and just made us love him even more.
The Story of... 'She's Like the Wind'
It was actually intended for the film Grandview USA, and later Youngblood, but was rejected by both before being accepted for Swayze's iconic 1987 drama.
Simple Minds - 'Don't You Forget About Me' (The Breakfast Club)
The Breakfast Club • Don't You (Forget About Me) • Simple Minds
Scottish band Simple Minds were brought in to record the main theme for teen drama The Breakfast Club, and they couldn't have done a better job.
One of the greatest '80s movie moments is surely Judd Nelson's John Bender fist pumping the sky to the tune of this '80s banger.
Dooley Wilson - 'As Time Goes By' (Casablanca)
Casablanca - As Time Goes By - Original Song by Sam (Dooley Wilson)
'Play it, Sam'.
A timeless ballad that has transcended cinema, and is now even used as the opening bars of all Warner Bros films.
Simon & Garfunkel - 'Mrs Robinson' (The Graduate)
Mrs. Robinson - Simon & Garfunkel - Lyrics
"Mrs Robinson, you're trying to seduce me..."
Simon & Garfunkel were recruited to provide a large chunk of the soundtrack for 1968 drama The Graduate, including this iconic song offered up by Paul Simon.
It was a huge hit around the world, but sadly missed out on an Oscar nomination as it was technically not written for the film.
Bob Seger - 'Old Time Rock & Roll' (Risky Business)
Risky Business Dance Scene
Originally recorded in 1979, this old-school rock track became a movie anthem after it was used in an iconic scene involving Tom Cruise, a pair of socks and a kick-ass skid.
Aerosmith - 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing' (Armageddon)
Aerosmith - I Don't Want to Miss a Thing (Official HD Video)
No-one saw this one coming, a sudden top five hit from stadium veteran rockers Aerosmith.
The Story of... 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing'
The power ballad featured in frontman Steven Tyler's daughter Liv Tyler's latest movie Armageddon, and it remains their all-time biggest hit in the UK.
Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper - 'Shallow' (A Star is Born)
Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper - Shallow (from A Star Is Born) (Official Music Video)
Barbra Streisand already had huge success with her '70s version of A Star is Born, including the song 'Evergreen'. But Gaga and Cooper had their own triumph with their 2018 remake.
The Story of... 'Shallow'
'Shallow' was one of many hugely popular songs from the soundtrack, and the heartbreaking ballad reached number one in the UK, and also won the Oscar for Best Song.
Judy Garland - 'Over the Rainbow' (The Wizard of Oz)
Somewhere Over the Rainbow - The Wizard of Oz (1/8) Movie CLIP (1939) HD
The iconic song that changed cinema forever. A teenage Judy Garland starred as Dorothy Gale in 1939, performing this timeless ballad about a hopeful future.
It won the Oscar for Best Song (of course it did), and has been covered by pretty much any artist you can think of from the 20th century.
Seal - 'Kiss from a Rose' (Batman Forever)
Seal - Kiss From A Rose (Official Music Video 720p HD) + Lyrics
This song was written in 1987, but weirdly, Seal felt “embarrassed by it” and “threw the tape in the corner”.
The Story of... 'Kiss From a Rose'
It was later used in the soundtrack for Batman Forever in 1995. Director Joel Schumacher called Seal to request the song to play over a love scene. However, it was instead used to play over the end credits, which helped it reach number one in the States that year, and won three Grammys.
Olivia Newton-John - 'Hopelessly Devoted to You' (Grease)
Grease - Hopelessly Devoted to You [1080p] [Lyrics]
Out of all the classic songs from Grease, this one still makes us feel all warm inside.
Halfway through shooting the movie, Olivia's contractually-entitled vocal solo had yet to be written.
John Farrar, Newton-John's producer, wrote the song and gave it to the film's team. Although reluctant, they eventually approved it, and recorded the scene after the other parts of the film had been completed.
Bee Gees - 'Stayin' Alive' (Saturday Night Fever)
Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive (Official Music Video)
It's impossible not to think of John Travolta strutting his stuff on a Friday night while the Bee Gees' pulsating disco anthem plays.
The Righteous Brothers - 'Unchained Melody' (Ghost)
Righteous Brothers | Unchained Melody [From the Movie Ghost]
'Unchained Melody' had its roots in film, as it originally appeared in the 1955 movie Unchained.
10 amazing facts you won't know about Ghost
Fast forward to 1990, and the Righteous Brothers version was used in a truly iconic scene involving Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and some messy and seductive pottery.
It propelled the '60s track back into the charts, and was 1990's best-selling single in the UK.
Bryan Adams - 'Everything I Do (I Do It For You)' (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves)
(Everything I Do) I Do It For You (Official Music Video)
You can't argue with 16 weeks at number one, which is still the record the consecutive weeks at the top to this day.
The Story of... 'Everything I Do'
Bryan Adams recorded the song for the Kevin Costner action caper, and you couldn't escape it in 1991.
Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes - 'Up Where We Belong' (An Officer and a Gentleman)
Up Where We Belong -- Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes
Ah, the sight Richard Gere in his navy whites in An Officer and a Gentleman.
This duet topped the US charts and won an Oscar, though producer Don Simpson was apparently convinced it would be a flop. Hindsight, eh?
Huey Lewis & the News - 'The Power of Love' (Back to the Future)
Huey Lewis & The News - The Power Of Love (Official Video)
The ultimate feel-good '80s movie pop anthem, Huey Lewis was hired to come up with a couple of tunes for Back to the Future, and he more than succeeded with this.
It was nominated for an Oscar, but lost out to Lionel Richie's 'Say You Say Me'.
Kenny Loggins - 'Footloose' (Footloose)
Kenny Loggins - Footloose (Official Video)
We'd argue that the Footloose movie wouldn't have been anywhere near as memorable or successful if it wasn't for this ridiculously catchy anthem by Kenny Loggins.
A number one hit in America, it lost out in the Best Song Oscar to Stevie Wonder's 'I Just Called To Say I Love You'.
Elton John - 'Circle of Life' (The Lion King)
Elton John - Circle of Life (From "The Lion King"/Official Video)
There's nothing quite like hearing the opening bars of 'Circle of Life' as The Lion King begins.
The 30 greatest Disney songs of all time, ranked
Written by Elton John, with lyrics by Tim Rice, the song was performed by Carmen Twillie and Lebo M in the original film. Elton also sang a pop version with slightly different lyrics, scoring a hit of his own.
'Circle of Life' was nominated for the Academy Award in 1994, but lost out to... 'Can You Feel the Love Tonight', also from The Lion King.
Gene Kelly - 'Singin' in the Rain' (Singin' in the Rain)
Singing In The Rain - Singing In The Rain (Gene Kelly) [HD Widescreen]
We realise we've said the word 'iconic' about 50 times in this article, but there's not many scenes in Hollywood history that deserves that title more than this.
A delightfully happy Gene Kelly (despite having a fever at the time) sings and dances in the rain in such a simple but amazing moment.
Bette Midler - 'The Wind Beneath My Wings' (Beaches)
Beaches • Wind Beneath My Wings • Bette Midler
A heartbreaking ballad performed brilliantly by Bette Midler at the end of Beaches, in this instance singing about the importance of lifelong friendships.
The Story of... 'The Wind Beneath My Wings'
First recorded by Kimahl of all people, Bette's version has become one of her signature songs and won her a couple of Grammy Awards.
John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John - 'You're the One that I Want' (Grease)
John Travolta And Olivia Newton John - You're The One That I Want
"Tell me about, stud..."
Along with 'Summer Nights', the two Johns scored two of the biggest hits of all time, let alone the 1970s.
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John recreate iconic Grease scene 41 years later
Both songs featured on the Grease soundtrack in 1978, and reached number one in the UK and sold 15 million copies worldwide.
Dolly Parton - '9 to 5' (9 to 5)
Dolly Parton - 9 To 5
Not only was Dolly excellent in this comedy film from 1980, but she recorded the song that the film is best known for, and it still sounds amazing.
Nominated for an Oscar and winner of two Grammys, it became one of Dolly's most beloved tracks, and became an anthem for disgruntled office workers and female empowerment.
Celine Dion - 'My Heart Will Go On' (Titanic)
Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On (HD)
For the biggest movie of all time, you needed a truly massive song. And they got it in the form of this Celine Dion power ballad.
The Story of... 'My Heart Will Go On' by Celine Dion from Titanic
Dion said retrospectively: "'My Heart Will Go On' gave me the opportunity to be associated with a classic that will live forever".
It won the Oscar for Best Song, dominated the Grammys and sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide.
Whitney Houston - 'I Will Always Love You' (The Bodyguard)
Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You (Official 4K Video)
The main love song from 1992's The Bodyguard starring Whitney and Kevin Costner, she made this Dolly Parton ballad her own, after her co-star Kevin suggested it.
The Story of... 'I Will Always Love You'
It spent 14 weeks at number one in the US, 10 weeks in the UK, and sold millions around the world.
Sadly, it couldn't win the Oscar for Best Song as Dolly didn't write it for the film, but we all know it would have done.
Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes - '(I've Had the) Time of My Life' (Dirty Dancing)
Dirty Dancing - Time of my Life (Final Dance) - High Quality
As movie songs go, this is the one to beat.
The Story of... 'Time of My Life'
Written for the film, a perfectly fantastic finale moment (don't try and do the lift, it never goes well), catchy as hell, the ultimate duet and karaoke song. It still sounds amazing after all these years no matter how many times you hear it.
It won an Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy, as it should have done. | ||
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] | 2012-06-13T14:15:26+00:00 | It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change. | en | https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/favicon-3888b0e329526a975703e3059a02b92d.ico | The Atlantic | https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/ | Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.
As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”
She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.
A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age or older that ranged from disappointed (“It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington”) to condescending (“I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great”).
The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough. But it was the second set of reactions—those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).
VIDEO: Anne-Marie Slaughter talks with Hanna Rosin about the struggles of working mothers.
Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first was from a young woman who began by thanking me for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.
The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.
I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.
Before my service in government, I’d spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation.
I knew that I was lucky in my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent two years in Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier and later, from home).
In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.
I am hardly alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three years as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend more time at home with her three children, two of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor to President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, wrote: “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”
Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it all about current attitudes toward work and family, particularly among elites. In Washington, “leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last December, TheNew York Times covered her decision as follows:
Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles of power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one’s vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view abides in the nation’s capital, despite the ritual commitments to “family values” that are part of every political campaign. Regardless, this sentiment makes true work-life balance exceptionally difficult. But it cannot change unless top women speak out.
Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by “younger women today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are just not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: “They think they have to choose between having a career and having a family.”
A similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s widely publicized 2011 commencement speech at Barnard, and her earlier TED talk, in which she lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and advised young women not to “leave before you leave.” When a woman starts thinking about having children, Sandberg said, “she doesn’t raise her hand anymore … She starts leaning back.” Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: “What’s the matter with you?”
They have an answer that we don’t want to hear. After the speech I gave in New York, I went to dinner with a group of 30-somethings. I sat across from two vibrant women, one of whom worked at the UN and the other at a big New York law firm. As nearly always happens in these situations, they soon began asking me about work-life balance. When I told them I was writing this article, the lawyer said, “I look for role models and can’t find any.” She said the women in her firm who had become partners and taken on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices, “many of which they don’t even seem to realize … They take two years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.” Her friend nodded, mentioning the top professional women she knew, all of whom essentially relied on round-the-clock nannies. Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.
I realize that I am blessed to have been born in the late 1950s instead of the early 1930s, as my mother was, or the beginning of the 20th century, as my grandmothers were. My mother built a successful and rewarding career as a professional artist largely in the years after my brothers and I left home—and after being told in her 20s that she could not go to medical school, as her father had done and her brother would go on to do, because, of course, she was going to get married. I owe my own freedoms and opportunities to the pioneering generation of women ahead of me—the women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who faced overt sexism of a kind I see only when watching Mad Men, and who knew that the only way to make it as a woman was to act exactly like a man. To admit to, much less act on, maternal longings would have been fatal to their careers.
But precisely thanks to their progress, a different kind of conversation is now possible. It is time for women in leadership positions to recognize that although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination. As Kerry Rubin and Lia Macko, the authors of Midlife Crisis at 30, their cri de coeur for Gen-X and Gen-Y women, put it:
I am well aware that the majority of American women face problems far greater than any discussed in this article. I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. We may not have choices about whether to do paid work, as dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.
Millions of other working women face much more difficult life circumstances. Some are single mothers; many struggle to find any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs. Many cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavailable or very expensive; school schedules do not match work schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate their children. Many of these women are worrying not about having it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have. And although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.
The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
Let’s briefly examine the stories we tell ourselves, the clichés that I and many other women typically fall back on when younger women ask us how we have managed to “have it all.” They are not necessarily lies, but at best partial truths. We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.
It’s possible if you are just committed enough.
Our usual starting point, whether we say it explicitly or not, is that having it all depends primarily on the depth and intensity of a woman’s commitment to her career. That is precisely the sentiment behind the dismay so many older career women feel about the younger generation. They are not committed enough, we say, to make the trade-offs and sacrifices that the women ahead of them made.
Yet instead of chiding, perhaps we should face some basic facts. Very few women reach leadership positions. The pool of female candidates for any top job is small, and will only grow smaller if the women who come after us decide to take time out, or drop out of professional competition altogether, to raise children. That is exactly what has Sheryl Sandberg so upset, and rightly so. In her words, “Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, [the share of] women at the top—C-level jobs, board seats—tops out at 15, 16 percent.”
What’s more, among those who have made it to the top, a balanced life still is more elusive for women than it is for men. A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues. Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children. And the third, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her younger child was almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National Security Council: Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security adviser, is also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have a family. Can “insufficient commitment” even plausibly explain these numbers? To be sure, the women who do make it to the top are highly committed to their profession. On closer examination, however, it turns out that most of them have something else in common: they are genuine superwomen. Consider the number of women recently in the top ranks in Washington—Susan Rice, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Michelle Gavin, Nancy-Ann Min DeParle—who are Rhodes Scholars. Samantha Power, another senior White House official, won a Pulitzer Prize at age 32. Or consider Sandberg herself, who graduated with the prize given to Harvard’s top student of economics. These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure.
The line of high-level women appointees in the Obama administration is one woman deep. Virtually all of us who have stepped down have been succeeded by men; searches for women to succeed men in similar positions come up empty. Just about every woman who could plausibly be tapped is already in government. The rest of the foreign-policy world is not much better; Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently surveyed the best data he could find across the government, the military, the academy, and think tanks, and found that women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions.
These numbers are all the more striking when we look back to the 1980s, when women now in their late 40s and 50s were coming out of graduate school, and remember that our classes were nearly 50-50 men and women. We were sure then that by now, we would be living in a 50-50 world. Something derailed that dream.
Sandberg thinks that “something” is an “ambition gap”—that women do not dream big enough. I am all for encouraging young women to reach for the stars. But I fear that the obstacles that keep women from reaching the top are rather more prosaic than the scope of their ambition. My longtime and invaluable assistant, who has a doctorate and juggles many balls as the mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me while I was working on this article: “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.
Consider some of the responses of women interviewed by Zenko about why “women are significantly underrepresented in foreign policy and national security positions in government, academia, and think tanks.” Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2011 and now writes a foreign-policy and national-security column for The Boston Globe, told Zenko that among other reasons,
Jolynn Shoemaker, the director of Women in International Security, agreed: “Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.”
These “mundane” issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap. I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.
It’s possible if you marry the right person.
Sandberg’s second message in her Barnard commencement address was: “The most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is.” Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently drove that message home to an audience of Princeton students and alumni gathered to hear her acceptance speech for the James Madison Medal. During the Q&A session, an audience member asked her how she managed her career and her family. She laughed and pointed to her husband in the front row, saying: “There’s my work-life balance.” I could never have had the career I have had without my husband, Andrew Moravcsik, who is a tenured professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. Andy has spent more time with our sons than I have, not only on homework, but also on baseball, music lessons, photography, card games, and more. When each of them had to bring in a foreign dish for his fourth-grade class dinner, Andy made his grandmother’s Hungarian palacsinta; when our older son needed to memorize his lines for a lead role in a school play, he turned to Andy for help.
Still, the proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.
Here I step onto treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.
Many factors determine this choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver. But it may be more than that. When I described the choice between my children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she said exactly what I felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive.
Men and women also seem to frame the choice differently. In Midlife Crisis at 30, Mary Matalin recalls her days working as President Bush’s assistant and Vice President Cheney’s counselor:
But Matalin goes on to describe her choice to leave in words that are again uncannily similar to the explanation I have given so many people since leaving the State Department:
To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish. Male leaders are routinely praised for having sacrificed their personal life on the altar of public or corporate service. That sacrifice, of course, typically involves their family. Yet their children, too, are trained to value public service over private responsibility. At the diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, one of his sons told the audience that when he was a child, his father was often gone, not around to teach him to throw a ball or to watch his games. But as he grew older, he said, he realized that Holbrooke’s absence was the price of saving people around the world—a price worth paying.
It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities? Perhaps leaders who invested time in their own families would be more keenly aware of the toll their public choices—on issues from war to welfare—take on private lives. (Kati Marton, Holbrooke’s widow and a noted author, says that although Holbrooke adored his children, he came to appreciate the full importance of family only in his 50s, at which point he became a very present parent and grandparent, while continuing to pursue an extraordinary public career.) Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.
In sum, having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient. If women feel deeply that turning down a promotion that would involve more travel, for instance, is the right thing to do, then they will continue to do that. Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.
It’s possible if you sequence it right.
Young women should be wary of the assertion “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at once.” This 21st-century addendum to the original line is now proffered by many senior women to their younger mentees. To the extent that it means, in the words of one working mother, “I’m going to do my best and I’m going to keep the long term in mind and know that it’s not always going to be this hard to balance,” it is sound advice. But to the extent that it means that women can have it all if they just find the right sequence of career and family, it’s cheerfully wrong.
The most important sequencing issue is when to have children. Many of the top women leaders of the generation just ahead of me—Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Patricia Wald, Nannerl Keohane—had their children in their 20s and early 30s, as was the norm in the 1950s through the 1970s. A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of time and energy for advancement.
Yet this sequence has fallen out of favor with many high-potential women, and understandably so. People tend to marry later now, and anyway, if you have children earlier, you may have difficulty getting a graduate degree, a good first job, and opportunities for advancement in the crucial early years of your career. Making matters worse, you will also have less income while raising your children, and hence less ability to hire the help that can be indispensable to your juggling act.
When I was the dean, the Woodrow Wilson School created a program called Pathways to Public Service, aimed at advising women whose children were almost grown about how to go into public service, and many women still ask me about the best “on-ramps” to careers in their mid-40s. Honestly, I’m not sure what to tell most of them. Unlike the pioneering women who entered the workforce after having children in the 1970s, these women are competing with their younger selves. Government and NGO jobs are an option, but many careers are effectively closed off. Personally, I have never seen a woman in her 40s enter the academic market successfully, or enter a law firm as a junior associate, Alicia Florrick of The Good Wife notwithstanding.
These considerations are why so many career women of my generation chose to establish themselves in their careers first and have children in their mid-to-late 30s. But that raises the possibility of spending long, stressful years and a small fortune trying to have a baby. I lived that nightmare: for three years, beginning at age 35, I did everything possible to conceive and was frantic at the thought that I had simply left having a biological child until it was too late.
And when everything does work out? I had my first child at 38 (and counted myself blessed) and my second at 40. That means I will be 58 when both of my children are out of the house. What’s more, it means that many peak career opportunities are coinciding precisely with their teenage years, when, experienced parents advise, being available as a parent is just as important as in the first years of a child’s life.
Many women of my generation have found themselves, in the prime of their careers, saying no to opportunities they once would have jumped at and hoping those chances come around again later. Many others who have decided to step back for a while, taking on consultant positions or part-time work that lets them spend more time with their children (or aging parents), are worrying about how long they can “stay out” before they lose the competitive edge they worked so hard to acquire.
Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not. You may well be a more mature and less frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also more likely to have found a lasting life partner. But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.
You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.
Back in the Reagan administration, a New York Times story about the ferociously competitive budget director Dick Darman reported, “Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey the impression that he was the last one working in the Reagan White House by leaving his suit coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left for home.” (Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in the office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of psychological manipulation suggests otherwise.)
The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.
But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization. In 2009, Sandra Pocharski, a senior female partner at Monitor Group and the head of the firm’s Leadership and Organization practice, commissioned a Harvard Business School professor to assess the factors that helped or hindered women’s effectiveness and advancement at Monitor. The study found that the company’s culture was characterized by an “always on” mode of working, often without due regard to the impact on employees. Pocharski observed:
I have worked very long hours and pulled plenty of all-nighters myself over the course of my career, including a few nights on my office couch during my two years in D.C. Being willing to put the time in when the job simply has to get done is rightfully a hallmark of a successful professional. But looking back, I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour. If Dick Darman had had a boss who clearly valued prioritization and time management, he might have found reason to turn out the lights and take his jacket home.
Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.
Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.
One way to change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in the late afternoon.
One real-world example comes from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a place most people are more likely to associate with distinguished gentlemen in pinstripes than with progressive thinking about work-family balance. Like so many other places, however, the FCO worries about losing talented members of two-career couples around the world, particularly women. So it recently changed its basic policy from a default rule that jobs have to be done on-site to one that assumes that some jobs might be done remotely, and invites workers to make the case for remote work. Kara Owen, a career foreign-service officer who was the FCO’s diversity director and will soon become the British deputy ambassador to France, writes that she has now done two remote jobs. Before her current maternity leave, she was working a London job from Dublin to be with her partner, using teleconferencing technology and timing her trips to London to coincide “with key meetings where I needed to be in the room (or chatting at the pre-meeting coffee) to have an impact, or to do intensive ‘network maintenance.’” In fact, she writes, “I have found the distance and quiet to be a real advantage in a strategic role, providing I have put in the investment up front to develop very strong personal relationships with the game changers.” Owen recognizes that not every job can be done this way. But she says that for her part, she has been able to combine family requirements with her career.
Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness. Two years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts decided to replace its “parental leave” policy with a “family leave” policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not only for new parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even employees who do not have children have family obligations.” The policy was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.” When I was the dean of the Wilson School, I managed with the mantra “Family comes first”—any family—and found that my employees were both productive and intensely loyal.
None of these changes will happen by themselves, and reasons to avoid them will seldom be hard to find. But obstacles and inertia are usually surmountable if leaders are open to changing their assumptions about the workplace. The use of technology in many high-level government jobs, for instance, is complicated by the need to have access to classified information. But in 2009, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who shares the parenting of his two young daughters equally with his wife, made getting such access at home an immediate priority so that he could leave the office at a reasonable hour and participate in important meetings via videoconferencing if necessary. I wonder how many women in similar positions would be afraid to ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs.
While employers shouldn’t privilege parents over other workers, too often they end up doing the opposite, usually subtly, and usually in ways that make it harder for a primary caregiver to get ahead. Many people in positions of power seem to place a low value on child care in comparison with other outside activities. Consider the following proposition: An employer has two equally talented and productive employees. One trains for and runs marathons when he is not working. The other takes care of two children. What assumptions is the employer likely to make about the marathon runner? That he gets up in the dark every day and logs an hour or two running before even coming into the office, or drives himself to get out there even after a long day. That he is ferociously disciplined and willing to push himself through distraction, exhaustion, and days when nothing seems to go right in the service of a goal far in the distance. That he must manage his time exceptionally well to squeeze all of that in.
Be honest: Do you think the employer makes those same assumptions about the parent? Even though she likely rises in the dark hours before she needs to be at work, organizes her children’s day, makes breakfast, packs lunch, gets them off to school, figures out shopping and other errands even if she is lucky enough to have a housekeeper—and does much the same work at the end of the day. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s indefatigable chief of staff, has twins in elementary school; even with a fully engaged husband, she famously gets up at four every morning to check and send e-mails before her kids wake up. Louise Richardson, now the vice chancellor of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, combined an assistant professorship in government at Harvard with mothering three young children. She organized her time so ruthlessly that she always keyed in 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33 on the microwave rather than 1:00, 2:00, or 3:00, because hitting the same number three times took less time.
Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has a similar story. When she had two young children and a part-time law practice, she struggled to find enough time to write the papers and articles that would help get her an academic position. In her words:
The discipline, organization, and sheer endurance it takes to succeed at top levels with young children at home is easily comparable to running 20 to 40 miles a week. But that’s rarely how employers see things, not only when making allowances, but when making promotions. Perhaps because people choose to have children? People also choose to run marathons.
One final example: I have worked with many Orthodox Jewish men who observed the Sabbath from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. Jack Lew, the two-time director of the Office of Management and Budget, former deputy secretary of state for management and resources, and now White House chief of staff, is a case in point. Jack’s wife lived in New York when he worked in the State Department, so he would leave the office early enough on Friday afternoon to take the shuttle to New York and a taxi to his apartment before sundown. He would not work on Friday after sundown or all day Saturday. Everyone who knew him, including me, admired his commitment to his faith and his ability to carve out the time for it, even with an enormously demanding job.
It is hard to imagine, however, that we would have the same response if a mother told us she was blocking out mid-Friday afternoon through the end of the day on Saturday, every week, to spend time with her children. I suspect this would be seen as unprofessional, an imposition of unnecessary costs on co-workers. In fact, of course, one of the great values of the Sabbath—whether Jewish or Christian—is precisely that it carves out a family oasis, with rituals and a mandatory setting-aside of work.
Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.
The American definition of a successful professional is someone who can climb the ladder the furthest in the shortest time, generally peaking between ages 45 and 55. It is a definition well suited to the mid-20th century, an era when people had kids in their 20s, stayed in one job, retired at 67, and were dead, on average, by age 71.
It makes far less sense today. Average life expectancy for people in their 20s has increased to 80; men and women in good health can easily work until they are 75. They can expect to have multiple jobs and even multiple careers throughout their working life. Couples marry later, have kids later, and can expect to live on two incomes. They may well retire earlier—the average retirement age has gone down from 67 to 63—but that is commonly “retirement” only in the sense of collecting retirement benefits. Many people go on to “encore” careers.
Assuming the priceless gifts of good health and good fortune, a professional woman can thus expect her working life to stretch some 50 years, from her early or mid-20s to her mid-70s. It is reasonable to assume that she will build her credentials and establish herself, at least in her first career, between 22 and 35; she will have children, if she wants them, sometime between 25 and 45; she’ll want maximum flexibility and control over her time in the 10 years that her children are 8 to 18; and she should plan to take positions of maximum authority and demands on her time after her children are out of the house. Women who have children in their late 20s can expect to immerse themselves completely in their careers in their late 40s, with plenty of time still to rise to the top in their late 50s and early 60s. Women who make partner, managing director, or senior vice president; get tenure; or establish a medical practice before having children in their late 30s should be coming back on line for the most demanding jobs at almost exactly the same age.
Along the way, women should think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope, but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips) when they turn down promotions to remain in a job that works for their family situation; when they leave high-powered jobs and spend a year or two at home on a reduced schedule; or when they step off a conventional professional track to take a consulting position or project-based work for a number of years. I think of these plateaus as “investment intervals.” My husband and I took a sabbatical in Shanghai, from August 2007 to May 2008, right in the thick of an election year when many of my friends were advising various candidates on foreign-policy issues. We thought of the move in part as “putting money in the family bank,” taking advantage of the opportunity to spend a close year together in a foreign culture. But we were also investing in our children’s ability to learn Mandarin and in our own knowledge of Asia.
Peaking in your late 50s and early 60s rather than your late 40s and early 50s makes particular sense for women, who live longer than men. And many of the stereotypes about older workers simply do not hold. A 2006 survey of human-resources professionals shows that only 23 percent think older workers are less flexible than younger workers; only 11 percent think older workers require more training than younger workers; and only 7 percent think older workers have less drive than younger workers.
Whether women will really have the confidence to stair-step their careers, however, will again depend in part on perceptions. Slowing down the rate of promotions, taking time out periodically, pursuing an alternative path during crucial parenting or parent-care years—all have to become more visible and more noticeably accepted as a pause rather than an opt-out. (In an encouraging sign, Mass Career Customization, a 2007 book by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg arguing that “today’s career is no longer a straight climb up the corporate ladder, but rather a combination of climbs, lateral moves, and planned descents,” was a Wall Street Journal best seller.)
Institutions can also take concrete steps to promote this acceptance. For instance, in 1970, Princeton established a tenure-extension policy that allowed female assistant professors expecting a child to request a one-year extension on their tenure clocks. This policy was later extended to men, and broadened to include adoptions. In the early 2000s, two reports on the status of female faculty discovered that only about 3 percent of assistant professors requested tenure extensions in a given year. And in response to a survey question, women were much more likely than men to think that a tenure extension would be detrimental to an assistant professor’s career.
So in 2005, under President Shirley Tilghman, Princeton changed the default rule. The administration announced that all assistant professors, female and male, who had a new child would automatically receive a one-year extension on the tenure clock, with no opt-outs allowed. Instead, assistant professors could request early consideration for tenure if they wished. The number of assistant professors who receive a tenure extension has tripled since the change.
One of the best ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role models. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and I are poles apart politically, but he went way up in my estimation when he announced that one reason he decided against running for president in 2012 was the impact his campaign would have had on his children. He reportedly made clear at a fund-raiser in Louisiana that he didn’t want to be away from his children for long periods of time; according to a Republican official at the event, he said that “his son [missed] him after being gone for the three days on the road, and that he needed to get back.” He may not get my vote if and when he does run for president, but he definitely gets my admiration (providing he doesn’t turn around and join the GOP ticket this fall).
If we are looking for high-profile female role models, we might begin with Michelle Obama. She started out with the same résumé as her husband, but has repeatedly made career decisions designed to let her do work she cared about and also be the kind of parent she wanted to be. She moved from a high-powered law firm first to Chicago city government and then to the University of Chicago shortly before her daughters were born, a move that let her work only 10 minutes away from home. She has spoken publicly and often about her initial concerns that her husband’s entry into politics would be bad for their family life, and about her determination to limit her participation in the presidential election campaign to have more time at home. Even as first lady, she has been adamant that she be able to balance her official duties with family time. We should see her as a full-time career woman, but one who is taking a very visible investment interval. We should celebrate her not only as a wife, mother, and champion of healthy eating, but also as a woman who has had the courage and judgment to invest in her daughters when they need her most. And we should expect a glittering career from her after she leaves the White House and her daughters leave for college.
One of the most complicated and surprising parts of my journey out of Washington was coming to grips with what I really wanted. I had opportunities to stay on, and I could have tried to work out an arrangement allowing me to spend more time at home. I might have been able to get my family to join me in Washington for a year; I might have been able to get classified technology installed at my house the way Jim Steinberg did; I might have been able to commute only four days a week instead of five. (While this last change would have still left me very little time at home, given the intensity of my job, it might have made the job doable for another year or two.) But I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring adults. But also irreplaceable years for me to enjoy the simple pleasures of parenting—baseball games, piano recitals, waffle breakfasts, family trips, and goofy rituals. My older son is doing very well these days, but even when he gives us a hard time, as all teenagers do, being home to shape his choices and help him make good decisions is deeply satisfying.
The flip side of my realization is captured in Macko and Rubin’s ruminations on the importance of bringing the different parts of their lives together as 30-year-old women:
Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work. When I was a law student in the 1980s, many women who were then climbing the legal hierarchy in New York firms told me that they never admitted to taking time out for a child’s doctor appointment or school performance, but instead invented a much more neutral excuse.
Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference.
After a few months of this, several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. “You have to stop talking about your kids,” one said. “You are not showing the gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.” I told them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together.
Ten years later, whenever I am introduced at a lecture or other speaking engagement, I insist that the person introducing me mention that I have two sons. It seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my time. As Secretary Clinton once said in a television interview in Beijing when the interviewer asked her about Chelsea’s upcoming wedding: “That’s my real life.” But I notice that my male introducers are typically uncomfortable when I make the request. They frequently say things like “And she particularly wanted me to mention that she has two sons”—thereby drawing attention to the unusual nature of my request, when my entire purpose is to make family references routine and normal in professional life.
This does not mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing. Indeed, Sheryl Sandberg recently acknowledged not only that she leaves work at 5:30 to have dinner with her family, but also that for many years she did not dare make this admission, even though she would of course make up the work time later in the evening. Her willingness to speak out now is a strong step in the right direction.
Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all. Bronnie Ware, an Australian blogger who worked for years in palliative care and is the author of the 2011 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, writes that the regret she heard most often was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.” She writes: “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.”
Juliette Kayyem, who several years ago left the Department of Homeland Security soon after her husband, David Barron, left a high position in the Justice Department, says their joint decision to leave Washington and return to Boston sprang from their desire to work on the “happiness project,” meaning quality time with their three children. (She borrowed the term from her friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and now runs a blog with that name.)
It’s time to embrace a national happiness project. As a daughter of Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and the university he founded, I grew up with the Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I checked, he did not declare American independence in the name of life, liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit of happiness, and let us start at home.
As I write this, I can hear the reaction of some readers to many of the proposals in this essay: It’s all fine and well for a tenured professor to write about flexible working hours, investment intervals, and family-comes-first management. But what about the real world? Most American women cannot demand these things, particularly in a bad economy, and their employers have little incentive to grant them voluntarily. Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company.
In fact, while many of these issues are hard to quantify and measure precisely, the statistics seem to tell a different story. A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2000, suggests that “organizations with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance” among their industry peers. These findings accorded with a 2003 study conducted by Michelle Arthur at the University of New Mexico. Examining 130 announcements of family-friendly policies in The Wall Street Journal, Arthur found that the announcements alone significantly improved share prices. In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.
This is only a small sampling from a large and growing literature trying to pin down the relationship between family-friendly policies and economic performance. Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity. Still others argue that results attributed to these policies are actually a function of good management overall. What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her.
Even the legal industry, built around the billable hour, is taking notice. Deborah Epstein Henry, a former big-firm litigator, is now the president of Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm focused partly on strategies for the retention of female attorneys. In her book Law and Reorder, published by the American Bar Association in 2010, she describes a legal profession “where the billable hour no longer works”; where attorneys, judges, recruiters, and academics all agree that this system of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to brutal work hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs. The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions. Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening.
At the core of all this is self-interest. Losing smart and motivated women not only diminishes a company’s talent pool; it also reduces the return on its investment in training and mentoring. In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike.
Experts on creativity and innovation emphasize the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking and cultivating randomness by taking long walks or looking at your environment from unusual angles. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, the innovation gurus John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”
Space for play and imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.” California is the cradle of American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports, food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure as seriously as they take work; where companies like Google deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light sabers, and policies that require employees to spend one day a week working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note.
No parent would mistake child care for childhood. Still, seeing the world anew through a child’s eyes can be a powerful source of stimulation. When the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling wrote The Strategy of Conflict, a classic text applying game theory to conflicts among nations, he frequently drew on child-rearing for examples of when deterrence might succeed or fail. “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar difficulty of constraining [a ruler] by the use of threats,” he wrote, “when one is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to keep a small child from hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.”
The books I’ve read with my children, the silly movies I’ve watched, the games I’ve played, questions I’ve answered, and people I’ve met while parenting have broadened my world. Another axiom of the literature on innovation is that the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.
Perhaps the most encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts of changes that I have proposed is that men are joining the cause. In commenting on a draft of this article, Martha Minow, the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me that one change she has observed during 30 years of teaching law at Harvard is that today many young men are asking questions about how they can manage a work-life balance. And more systematic research on Generation Y confirms that many more men than in the past are asking questions about how they are going to integrate active parenthood with their professional lives.
Abstract aspirations are easier than concrete trade-offs, of course. These young men have not yet faced the question of whether they are prepared to give up that more prestigious clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion, or delay their professional goals to spend more time with their children and to support their partner’s career.
Yet once work practices and work culture begin to evolve, those changes are likely to carry their own momentum. Kara Owen, the British foreign-service officer who worked a London job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail:
Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family. It is noteworthy that both James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, stepped down two years into the Obama administration so that they could spend more time with their children (for real).
Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new generation of young men who have been raised by full-time working mothers. Let us presume, as I do with my sons, that they will understand “supporting their families” to mean more than earning money.
I have been blessed to work with and be mentored by some extraordinary women. Watching Hillary Clinton in action makes me incredibly proud—of her intelligence, expertise, professionalism, charisma, and command of any audience. I get a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep in conversation about some of the most important issues on the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian people in the Security Council.
These women are extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to look to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual. Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”
I gave a speech at Vassar last November and arrived in time to wander the campus on a lovely fall afternoon. It is a place infused with a spirit of community and generosity, filled with benches, walkways, public art, and quiet places donated by alumnae seeking to encourage contemplation and connection. Turning the pages of the alumni magazine (Vassar is now coed), I was struck by the entries of older alumnae, who greeted their classmates with Salve (Latin for “hello”) and wrote witty remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a world in which women wore their learning lightly; their news is mostly of their children’s accomplishments. Many of us look back on that earlier era as a time when it was fine to joke that women went to college to get an “M.R.S.” And many women of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as soon as the formerly all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I would never return to the world of segregated sexes and rampant discrimination. But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about.
I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 4 | https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/23/pretty-woman-30-conservatism-materialism-glowing-star-power | en | Pretty Woman at 30: conservatism, materialism and glowing star power | [
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] | 2020-03-23T00:00:00 | Garry Marshall’s hit romantic comedy might have some questionable sexual politics but Julia Roberts remains a magnetic breakout | en | the Guardian | https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/23/pretty-woman-30-conservatism-materialism-glowing-star-power | There are a lot of fantasies at play in Pretty Woman, the hit romantic comedy that transformed Julia Roberts into one of the biggest stars in Hollywood virtually overnight 30 years ago. It’s a fantasy about a humble Georgia girl getting her fairytale ending. It’s a fantasy about upward mobility on the streets and salons of Beverly Hills. It’s a fantasy about turning Roberts herself into a modern-day Audrey Hepburn, prim and elegant and absolutely certain to know which type of fork is appropriate for each course. (Count the tines.)
But the most unlikely fantasy of all is Roberts playing a Hollywood Boulevard streetwalker who really isn’t that kind of gal. Roberts plays Vivian Ward, an 11th-grade dropout who lives in a flophouse with Kit (Laura San Giacomo), her irreverent best friend and prostitution guru. The film makes it clear that she’s new to sex trade, that she doesn’t do drugs, that she doesn’t have a pimp and that she enjoys complete agency over the questions of “who”, “when” and “how much”. Late in the film, after Vivian has spent a week at the Beverly Wilshire with a rich client, Kit tells her: “You sure don’t fit in on the Boulevard lookin’ like you do. Not that you ever did.”
Like all the classic Old Hollywood romantic comedies, Pretty Woman is about a man and a woman who are locked into a flirty but contentious struggle to get on equal footing, with the woman usually at a disadvantage. Director Garry Marshall makes vintage entertainment an obsession for Vivian, who guffaws infectiously at old I Love Lucy episodes and falls asleep watching Hepburn and Cary Grant in Charade. Marshall and his screenwriter, JF Lawton, are preoccupied by turning Vivian into a picture of innocence – not a sex worker who hits the lottery, but a naif who discovers the proper lady she always was.
And it’s not like master-of-the-universe Edward Lewis was out looking for a call girl, either, even though he’s played by Richard Gere, who had a star-making turn himself as a gorgeous, narcissistic sex worker in American Gigolo. Edward is just an out-of-towner looking for directions, so his intentions are pure, too. So Vivian and Edward’s partnership starts with a more traditional romcom meet-cute and chemistry takes over from there. The two bond over their transactional natures: as someone who buys and butchers distressed companies for a living, Edward appreciates Vivian’s talent for hard-nosed negotiation. She gouges him for directions and gouges him again with rates for her hourly, overnight and weekly services.
Edward’s transactional nature so defines his life that he’s nearly incapable of taking pleasure in it. He was an only child who hated his father so much that crushing his business was an early priority. Vivian gives him the uncomplicated companionship he needs to get through a tough week of acquisition talks in Los Angeles — he seems pleased with himself to have discovered someone like her, who doesn’t seem to need him like his ex-wife or the girlfriend currently moving out of his apartment. He wants the best: the penthouse suite, the best booth at the opera, the escargot at a fancy restaurant. Pretty Woman is about getting him to care about something that doesn’t involve him reaching into his wallet.
But really, money is everything in Pretty Woman. The film may have come out in early 1990, but for anthropological purposes, it’s as 1980s as Donkey Kong, Bananarama and the Rubik’s Cube. The first utterances of the script reference a savings and loan officer, and Edward picks up Vivian in a 1989 silver Lotus Esprit that he can’t drive. The most famous sequences of the film are Vivian shopping on Rodeo Drive with Edward’s cash and credit card, the camera ogling brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci and BMW. Aside from Edward’s sleazy lawyer Phillip (Jason Alexander), the biggest villains here are the shopkeepers who get one look at Vivian in her Hollywood Boulevard get-up and say, “I don’t think we have anything for you.”
Vivian’s rejection at this salon paves the way for a sweet comeuppance later on, when she takes her business elsewhere, but the film secretly sides with the snobs. It implies that she really isn’t a good enough person to deserve high-end service, so it’s up to the hotel manager, played by Marshall favorite Héctor Elizondo, to give her lessons in refinement. Pretty Woman wants the audience to see Elizondo as the ultimate gentleman – and the actor is charming enough to oblige – but in actuality, it’s an embarrassment to have her at his hotel. That she turns out to be a prize pupil surprises him, but he’s the gatekeeper to Edward’s world and she needs to learn how to be rich.
And yet for all its risible qualities, including a third-act sexual assault attempt, star power takes it much further than it has any right to go. Roberts makes a glamorous Cinderella, but she’s also blessedly unpretentious, given to little bursts of laughter and salty language even after she’s been through charm school. The bit where Edward surprises Vivian by snapping a necklace case on her fingers is an all-time movie moment for a reason: Roberts looks impossibly elegant in the shoulder-less red dress and white satin gloves, but she can’t suppress the yelping laugh that connects her to common folk. Gere’s tendency to underact, occasionally to the point to somnambulism, makes him the perfect counterpoint to the VistaVision bigness of Roberts’ charm, like a diamond that only pops when it’s offset by a much simpler setting.
There’s every reason to resist the gross materialism and conservative sexual politics of Pretty Woman, but Roberts makes Vivian’s ascendence to the upper crust a victory for the little guy. Being happy for her is as easy as being happy for a friend who hit the lottery. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 50 | https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/top-18-pandemic-virus-themed-movies-will-keep-you-edge-your-seat | en | Top 18 Pandemic and Virus-Themed Movies That Will Keep You on the Edge of Your Seat | [
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] | 2023-12-25T13:10:00+00:00 | Explore our handpicked selection of the most gripping pandemic and virus-themed films, featuring thrilling narratives and star-studded casts, perfect for an unforgettable movie night! | en | /favicon.ico | Infection Control Today | https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/top-18-pandemic-virus-themed-movies-will-keep-you-edge-your-seat | After you open your holiday presents, embark on a cinematic journey through pandemics, viruses, and apocalyptic adventures! We've compiled a thrilling list of films that will make your heart race, your mind ponder, and your laughter burst out unexpectedly.
From infectious outbreaks to post-apocalyptic worlds, these movies have it all. So, grab your popcorn, hunker down, and join us on this thrilling rollercoaster of pandemic-themed cinema!
1. Outbreak (1995)
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman
Rotten Tomato Rating: 59%
Outbreak is a fictional story about the American government's response to a deadly pandemic. The story features the possibility of bombing a California town where most of the residents are sick. With Morgan Freeman and Dustin Hoffman, it must be good.
2. Contagion (2011)
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet
Rotten Tomato Rating: 85%
Contagion explores societal reactions during a pandemic, boasting a star-studded cast.
3. World War Z (2013)
Starring: Brad Pitt
Rotten Tomato Rating: 66%
A mix of pandemic and zombie apocalypse, envisioning a society plagued by a virus. Good movie, but could it really happen?
4. 28 Days Later (2002)
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston
Rotten Tomato Rating: 87%
Set post-pandemic, 1 month after a virus outbreak turns people into "rage" zombies. More zombies….
5. 12 Monkeys (1995)
Starring: Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt
Rotten Tomato Rating: 88%
Combining pandemics and time travel, it follows a quest to uncover a deadly virus's origins. Bruce Willis shines as always.
6. Black Death (2010)
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean, Carice van Houten
Rotten Tomato Rating: 71%
Set during the bubonic plague, it involves a young monk on a mission to a necromancer-infested village. Eddie is back in the past.
7. The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Starring: Vincent Price
Rotten Tomato Rating: 65%
A horrifying adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's story, of course, because…Vincent Price.
8. Flu (2013)
Starring: Jang Hyuk, Soo Ae, Min-ah Park
Rotten Tomato Rating: 61%
Set in South Korea, it depicts chaos amid an airborne virus outbreak near Seoul. Dubbed in English from Korean, the movie is a look into what could happen.
9. Infection (2019)
Starring: Rubén Guevara, Leonidas Urbina, Magdiel González
Rotten Tomato Rating: n/a
A man races to save his son during a rabies virus turning people into rampaging zombies. More zombies….
10. The Happening (2008)
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel
Rotten Tomato Rating: 24%
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, it portrays an unknown virus causing suicides. Like most Shyamalan movies, it is suspenseful…and terrifying.
11. Blindness (2008) –
Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo
Rotten Tomato Rating: 44%
A world grappling with an epidemic that causes blindness. This is an adaption of Jose Sarmago’s 1995 book of the same name. Sarmago is a Portuguese author.
12. Bird Box (2018)
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich
Rotten Tomato Rating: 64%
Netflix original where a mysterious pathogen prompts mass suicides.
13. Carriers (2009)
Starring: Chris Pine, Piper Perabo, Lou Taylor Pucci –
Rotten Tomato Rating: 66%
Four friends navigate a virus outbreak while confronting their own darkness. Sounds good with Chris Pine in it.
14. Zombieland (2009)
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson
Rotten Tomato Rating: 89%
A humorous take on a "mad zombie disease" spreading across the US. Good to have some humor!
15. I Am Legend (2007)
Starring: Will Smith
Rotten Tomato Rating: 69%
It is set in a post-apocalyptic world after a pathogen outbreak transforms humans.
16. Quarantine (2008)
Starring: Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris, Columbus Short
Rotten Tomato Rating: 56%
A "found footage" film follows a TV reporter and cameraman in a quarantined building.
17. The Andromeda Strain (1971)
Starring: James Olson, David Wayne, Arthur Hill, and Kate Reid
Rotten Tomato Rating: 67%
Based on Michael Crichton's novel, it follows scientists investigating a mysterious virus's impact on a town.
18. Containment (2015) | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 72 | https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/g26027881/best-romantic-movies-of-all-time/ | en | The 41 Best Romantic Movies of All Time | [
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"Justin Kirkland",
"Emma Carey",
"Adrianna Freedman"
] | 2019-02-02T11:00:19.616315-05:00 | We've put together the most romantic movies of all time. from Titanic to Casablanca, with a couple new favorites scattered in, too. | en | /_assets/design-tokens/esquire/static/images/favicon.9bd3ce0.ico | Esquire | https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/g26027881/best-romantic-movies-of-all-time/ | As the saying goes: One person’s crush is another person’s cringe. No matter how hard we try as a society, humanity has always failed to reach a consensus on the rules of romance. Though many of us might agree that there should be some serious dos and don’ts to PDA on a crowded subway, overall it’s for the best that we leave love unbridled. Luckily for us, the romantic film genre has followed suit. From comedy to drama, classic to quirky, and sappy to cynical, there’s plenty of fish in the sea to find your romantic movie soulmate. If you’re on the market, these iconic titles (along with a few new wild cards) will turn you into a Casanova in no time. Here are some of the most romantic movies ever made. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 84 | https://www.aclu.org/news/topic/artists | en | ACLU Artist & Entertainment Partners | [
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] | null | [] | 2024-01-09T23:55:12+00:00 | The latest on ACLU Artist & Entertainment Partners | en | American Civil Liberties Union | https://www.aclu.org/news/topic/artists | Over the years, the ACLU has partnered with many members of the entertainment industry on film screenings, panel discussions, documentary films, delegations, and awareness campaigns. The ACLU Ambassador Project is an exciting next step in the ACLU's longtime collaboration with the entertainment community, in an effort to use celebrity for the greater good.
The ACLU Ambassador Project ties influential creative artists in film, television, music and comedy with public education and advocacy for key ACLU issues. Each Ambassador works with the ACLU on specific civil liberties issues, which include: immigrants’ rights, voting rights, rights of LGBTQ people and people living with HIV, women’s rights, abortion/reproductive rights, reducing mass incarceration, racial justice, and privacy and security. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 27 | https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/09/16/qa-with-raymond-telles-latinx-film/ | en | Learning about Latinx culture, experiences through film | [
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"Anne Brice"
] | 2022-09-16T00:00:00 | "I’m trying to expose students to not only films, but to the context in which these films were made," says lecturer Raymond Telles | en | /favicon.svg?v=2.1 | Berkeley News | https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/09/16/qa-with-raymond-telles-latinx-film/ | “We’re all connected in so many different ways,” says UC Berkeley lecturer Raymond Telles. “And film is a wonderful way of bringing together those connections.”
Telles is a documentary filmmaker and an adjunct professor in Berkeley’s Department of Ethnic Studies. He teaches a series of three courses that explore the Latinx/Chicanx experience in the United States and in Latin America through narrative and documentary film.
This semester, he’s teaching the course, Latino Narrative Film Since 1990. In the class, students watch a variety of works that were produced in the U.S. and in Latin America, from independent films, like Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) and Raising Victor Vargas, to Hollywood movies, like Once Upon A Time In Mexico and Frida.
“I’m trying to expose students to not only films, but the context in which these films were made — the influences that shaped the views reflected in the works,” Telles says. “Many of these films that were made years ago have themes that still resonate.”
Berkeley News spoke with Telles, who prefers to use the terms Latino and Chicano, about why he thinks it’s important to learn about Latin America through film and how he hopes his students come away inspired to further explore Latin American art and culture.
Berkeley News: What film courses do you teach at Berkeley?
I teach a series of three courses on Latino film — 135A, B and C — that I developed with Alex Saragoza, a professor emeritus of Chicano and Latino studies, about 20 years ago. In 135A, I show narrative films made from the 1950s to the ’90s that are about or made by U.S. Latinos — so Chicanos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans. In 135B, which I’m teaching this semester, we look at films from 1990 to the present, and 135C focuses on documentaries. I also teach an American cultures course that examines race and ethnicity in contemporary American films.
What are some of the films your class will watch this semester? What themes and representations of Latin American people and cultures do they address?
We’ll watch the 1994 Oscar-nominated Fresa y Chocolate, set in Havana, Cuba, in 1979. It’s about a young gay intellectual who forms an unlikely and deep friendship with a conservative college student. Although same-sex relationships became legal that year in Cuba, being openly gay remained highly taboo in the country. It’s really a coming-of-age story, but it’s also a film about a country of great contradictions and about coming to an awareness of what it was like to be gay in Cuba at that time. It’s really a lovely story.
I’ll show a film called The Motorcycle Diaries, which is a portrayal of young Che Guevara before he was a revolutionary. It’s a journey throughout Latin America. It’s beautifully shot. We’re spending two hours in this dark room on a tour, seeing places in Latin America we wouldn’t normally see. For me, it’s kind of like an escape, where we get to experience this journey with him.
We’ll also watch Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman), which came out in 2017 and won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s about a love affair between an upper-class Chilean businessman and a trans woman, who is played by a trans actor. It’s absolutely lovely. I always try to introduce new films with new representation as culture shifts and changes.
Why is it important to you that students learn about Latin America, in general, and also through film?
The United States and Latin America — Central America, especially — have been linked together since the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the late 15th century.
I made a film about 10 years ago called The Storm That Swept Mexico, about the Mexican Revolution. The U.S. had huge investments in Mexico right up until the revolution, and the revolution was basically about returning those natural resources, those investments, back to Mexico. There were a million people crossing the border in 1910 because of that bloody war. The same goes on between Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the mass migrations of these folks coming to the U.S. right now are a result of the relations we had with those countries going back 100 years or more.
Film is a fascinating way of looking at history and understanding the relationships between the U.S. and countries that we take for granted. I think we need to be well-informed as citizens as to what’s going on with our neighbors. There’s a big gap in the teaching of American history, particularly the history of the Southwest. Until 1848, the Southwest was Mexico. So, I think we can do a little bit to fill that gap through film.
We have a lot of Mexican American and Central American students at Cal, many of whom are citizens and many who are recently arrived immigrants. I think we need to serve them. Plus, our student body has to understand who makes up this country, particularly California.
You show several U.S. films by Mexican filmmakers. What are a few of these films?
There are many Mexican filmmakers who have worked in Hollywood for a long time. They bring a different perspective than a traditional Mexican filmmaker or a traditional American filmmaker. They’re bridging, and they work very fluidly within both countries and cultures.
Alejandro González Iñárritu, for example, has directed a lot of big films — 21 Grams, The Revenant, Birdman. He often deals with themes of alienation and immigration in many of his movies. Babel, written by Guillermo Arriaga Jordán and directed by Iñárritu, takes place in Morocco, the U.S., Japan and Mexico post-9/11. It asks the questions about how America is dealing with terrorism, and what happens in a country where American privilege doesn’t matter anymore.
Do you encourage students to go beyond watching films in class?
Yes. I’m always trying to tie together the films and themes we explore in class to our larger community.
When I last taught this course a few years ago, we watched the 2015 film Ixcanul (Volcano), about a 17-year-old Guatemalan girl who lives on the slopes of an active volcano and whose marriage is arranged by her Kaqchikel parents.
After the class saw the film, I invited two people from the Kaqchikel community in Oakland to speak with the class about the representation of Indigenous communities in Latin American film. Then, I arranged a virtual meeting with an activist in Guatemala, who talked about Indigenous women’s issues in the country.
When we watch Frida later this semester, about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, I’ll encourage students to visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which holds several works by Kahlo in its collection and is presenting a major retrospective about Mexican painter Diego Rivera, a longtime partner of Kahlo’s. On Thursdays, SFMOMA is free, so they can take the BART to Third Street and see it then.
Film is just an introduction, quite frankly. I hope each student walks away with their interest piqued, wanting to learn more.
What do you hope students take from your class?
I hope it will demystify filmmaking and encourage students, especially those from underrepresented cultures and communities, to tell their own stories. One student I’m working with right now is making a film about her mother, who is an immigrant from Japan and married an African American man from the United States. It’s about her mother’s experience living in San Francisco.
Making films is all about storytelling. I tell students: Sit down and talk to your mother, your father, your grandparents. Get your story out, because no one else is going to do it for you. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 86 | https://www.mbib.com/en-us | en | Hair Care & Beauty Products for Natural Hair | [
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5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 69 | https://newn.cam.ac.uk/about/history/womens-education | en | Women's Education | https://newn.cam.ac.ukview_over_gardens_from_dg_aurora_gao_2023.jpg | https://newn.cam.ac.ukview_over_gardens_from_dg_aurora_gao_2023.jpg | [
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] | null | [] | 2024-02-13T00:00:00 | Newnham College was founded in 1871 by a group of radicals. | en | /themes/custom/newnham/favicon.ico | Newnham College | https://newn.cam.ac.uk/about/history/womens-education | Newnham College was founded in 1871 by a group of radicals. Their radical beliefs? They argued that women were every bit as intelligent as men, and that women, too, deserved a first class education.
With determination and courage, they created the Cambridge college we see today. This short history of women’s education in Britain explores the challenges our founders faced.
Education has always been influenced by gender, class, religion and nationality. Historically, women’s education in Britain was designed to teach middle class and upper class girls enough to make them attractive marriage material for men, and lessons were often taught in the home by poorly educated governesses.
Education was seen as a way of making women better wives and mothers, not as a way of transforming their lives. One parliamentary report in the 19th century said girls should be educated to be ‘decorative, modest, marriageable beings’. Lessons often included music, Latin, Greek and classes in social graces and etiquette. Only the very privileged few were taught to a high level in subjects such as mathematics and this was usually alongside their brothers.
Women’s education always conformed to class expectations. Working class girls, if they were educated at all, were taught the very basics of reading, writing, arithmetic and domestic skills such as needlework. They were taught in elementary schools, often dame schools – small schools run by working class women in their own home – or Sunday schools run by the church or charities. Women were not encouraged to have academic aspirations in case it undermined their attachment to the home and it was believed that academic study was against women’s nature and that too much knowledge could affect women’s fertility. Church leaders were often against the higher education of women because they said it went against the teachings of the Bible.
The painfully slow process of education reform began in the 1840s after it was acknowledged that if women were the first educators of children, then they needed a solid education. Educational opportunity was still in the gift of men and by 1864, it was noted that only 12 public secondary schools for girls existed in England and Wales. These early schools for women supported the findings of a report by the Taunton Commission which said, in the 1860s, that men and women had the same mental capacity.
Momentum was gathering and organisations such as The Langham Place Group, which campaigned for women’s rights, were founded. The National Union for Improving the Education of Women started in 1871 and by 1900 there were more than 30 fee-paying boarding schools for women. Opportunities for working class girls, however, were limited well into the 20th century.
Pioneering headmistresses at the early schools for girls switched the focus from domestic accomplishments to academic excellence and Anne Jemima Clough, Newnham’s first principal, made allowances for women who had gaps in their education and tailored the curriculum to her female students to allow them to take longer to prepare for Cambridge exams if necessary.
The founders of Girton College, Cambridge’s first women’s college, and Newnham, its second, recognised and campaigned for the standards of higher education to be improved so that women could compete with men at the highest level.
It wasn’t until 1918 that the Education Act raised the compulsory school leaving age to 14 for both boys and girls.
In the 21st century, Newnham College continues to challenge stereotypes and limitations. We pride ourselves on being a place at which people can fulfill their potential, wherever that journey may lead us.
Find out about student life at Newnham College today. | ||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 90 | https://www.lofficielbaltic.com/en/beauty/the-10-most-beautiful-women-in-the-world-according-to-scientists | en | The 10 Most Beautiful Women in the World According to Scientists | [
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] | 2022-01-28T06:33:51+00:00 | The 10 Most Beautiful Women in the World According to Scientists | en | /favicon/apple-icon-57x57.png | L'Officiel Baltic | https://www.lofficielbaltic.com/en/beauty/the-10-most-beautiful-women-in-the-world-according-to-scientists | In the world of luxury lighting, Terzani continues to push boundaries, creating lighting solutions that are as much works of art as they are functional pieces. Known for its innovative designs that blend sculpture, light, shadow, and motion, Terzani transforms ordinary spaces into extraordinary experiences. Terzani’s exquisite creations will soon be exclusively available at the Archideco Design Centre, located at Strelnieku 8/4.
For true fashionistas, there's nothing more exciting than searching for vintage treasures! It's a real treat for connoisseurs to immerse themselves in a retro-chic atmosphere, find iconic archive pieces and build a closet in the style of a bygone era. Explore fashion boutiques and online stores for an inspiring luxury shopping experience.
This year marks 70 years since the first Series Land Rover entered service with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in 1954. Defender marks its anniversary with a new flagship project in Italy, where the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement was born 160 years ago.
First Impact Communications made a significant expansion of its client portfolio with the addition of &Beyond, a world-renowned leader in luxury eco-tourism. Effective August 2024, the Prague-based agency will provide comprehensive PR and communication services for &Beyond across the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, marking a pivotal step in &Beyond's expansion into this dynamic market. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 89 | https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240524-eight-of-the-best-films-of-2024-so-far | en | Eight of the best films of 2024 so far | [
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"Nicholas Barber and Caryn James"
] | 2024-05-28T11:00:00+00:00 | BBC Culture film critics Nicholas Barber and Caryn James pick their highlights of the year so far. | en | /bbcx/apple-touch-icon.png | https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240524-eight-of-the-best-films-of-2024-so-far | BBC Culture film critics Nicholas Barber and Caryn James pick their highlights of the year so far, including a vision of a war-torn America, a wonderfully creepy nun horror, and an outrageous Kristen Stewart crime thriller.
1. The Beast
I came out of The Beast thinking "This is the weirdest film I've seen since Poor Things", but also that I loved it. Bertrand Bonello has created an audacious, imaginative film about love, memory, pain and artificial intelligence that roams over three time periods, each featuring versions of Gabrielle and Louis, played by Léa Seydoux and George MacKay. In a stark and chilling 2044, AI can be used to erase feelings of pain, including a broken heart, but that means reexperiencing those memories to erase them. Gabrielle begins the process, which leads her to Belle Epoque Paris, where she is unhappily married and George is an unsettling attraction, and Los Angeles in 2014, where she is housesitting and he is her stalker. Careening through the time periods, The Beast is the kind of head-spinning story that may not piece together neatly at first, but is so filled with unexpected turns and set pieces – such as Gabrielle and Louis caught in the flooded basement of a doll factory in Paris – that it is constantly exhilarating. (CJ)
2. Immaculate
Sydney Sweeney (also the film's producer) stars in this wonderfully creepy horror movie about an American novice nun who learns that all is not as it seems in an Italian convent. Immaculate could easily have been a trashy nunsploitation B-movie, but it's (mother) superior in many ways, from the bold commentary on men's treatment of women to cinematography that recalls Renaissance religious art. What's most striking about the film, though, is its willingness to take things to jaw-dropping extremes. There are countless moments when you're watching it and you think, "No... they're not going to go there... they wouldn't..." And then they do. (NB)
3. Civil War
Reactions to this film were almost as polarised as the divided country it depicts, a sure sign that Alex Garland hit a nerve with his vision of a near-future US that has descended into civil war under a fascist president. Kirsten Dunst is at the centre as a photojournalist who, along with her colleagues – played by Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny and Stephen McKinley Henderson – put themselves at great risk to witness and report the action around them. Garland makes that action visceral and explosive, from guns and tanks on the streets of Washington DC to violent one-on-one encounters in the supposedly calm countryside. But the most harrowing aspect of the film is how acutely and convincingly he positions the fiction as a hairsbreadth away from the real world around us. Some viewers complained that Garland didn't set up a more pointed political conflict, but to me the film is chilling enough in its vision of an all-too-credible war-torn future. (CJ)
4. Love Lies Bleeding
Kristen Stewart's character has a miserable life at the start of Love Lies Bleeding, as Kristen Stewart's characters so often do. She manages a dingy gym in a small town, she avoids her gangster father (Ed Harris), and she tries in vain to persuade her sister (Jena Malone) to end her abusive marriage. But everything changes when a charismatic drifter played by Katy O'Brian stops off on her way to a body-building contest in Las Vegas. Sparks fly, and the fireworks of sweaty sex, shocking violence and all-round craziness keep exploding. A stylish, blackly comic lesbian film noir from Rose Glass, the British director who made her feature debut with acclaimed horror Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding is the most fun and imaginative indie crime thriller since Good Time (2017), which happened to star Stewart's Twilight co-star, Robert Pattinson. (NB)
5. La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher's films – like 2018's great, fabulistic Happy as Lazzaro – are tinged with magic realism. La Chimera, set in Tuscany in the 1980s, is among her best as it walks the line between richly-textured realism and dreams. Josh O'Connor stars as Arthur, an Englishman who works with a band of local Italian graverobbers to find ancient artifacts in Etruscan tombs to sell on the black market. Seedy looking and sad, Arthur is reeling from losing his love, Beniamina. As one character puts it, he is searching in the underground for "a door to the afterlife" and at times seems to find it. Rohrwacher has an eye for finding beauty in ruins, whether the big crumbling house where Beniamina's mother (Isabella Rossellini) lives, or Arthur himself. The plot keeps moving, with danger, crime and escapes from the police, but the film is shaped by O'Connor's poignant, low-key but charismatic performance and Rohrwacher's elegant vision, lushly filmed by the great cinematographer Helene Louvart. (CJ)
6. Robot Dreams
Robot Dreams is a cartoon like no other. It's a Spanish-French production, and yet it's a loving homage to the vibrancy of 1980s New York. It's animated in a 2D picture-book style, and yet it's bursting with tiny details. It doesn't have any dialogue, and yet it's peppered with wit and wisdom. It's all about a dog and a robot, and yet it's a richly human exploration of loneliness and companionship. Adapted from Sara Varon's graphic novel and directed by Pablo Berger, this Oscar-nominated gem tells the enchanting tale of two friends who find heartwarming joy in each other's company – and then have to work out whether they can learn to live apart. (NB)
7. Io Capitano
Few migrant dramas are as stirring, humane and suspenseful as this one, about the treacherous journey of a 16-year-old boy as he leaves Senegal in search of a better life. Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah) won the award for best director at the 2023 Venice Film Festival for the film, and his non-professional star, Seydou Sarr, won best young actor as the fictional Seydou, a gentle boy determined to make it to Italy along with his cousin, Moussa. Each stage of the boys' travels presents a different danger. They set out across the Sahara with a group of other migrants, and when one woman dies, Seydou sees her gliding through the air, as if the reality is too much to take in. In Libya he is imprisoned and tortured. In the final stages he must pilot a boat full of migrants toward Italy, giving the film its title, Io Capitano (I Captain). With relatively few words, Garrone and Sarr create an eloquent, piercingly real film about one person, whose story resonates with the situation of millions around the world. (CJ)
8. Perfect Days
You wouldn't necessarily think that someone who cleaned public toilets for a living had found the secret to happiness, but Wim Wenders' Perfect Days makes a strong case for the idea. A Japanese-language film from the German writer-director, this hypnotic character study follows Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) around Tokyo as he carries out his janitorial duties, waters his plants, reads novels, listens to American rock music and takes photos of trees, all with the same quiet diligence and pride. There are hints here and there about how Hirayama's life has changed, and how it might change in the future, but the core of the film is a documentary-like meditation on the serenity of an existence stripped to its essentials. Also, the public toilets themselves are so well designed that Perfect Days could well turn them into tourist attractions. (NB)
-- | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 1 | https://www.byarcadia.org/post/stereotypical-women-s-representation-in-the-film-industry | en | Stereotypical Women's Representation in the Film Industry | [
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"Angelina Fedorova"
] | 2023-01-27T12:52:07.628000+00:00 | The article discusses social theories and the division of resources in filmmaking, causing a stereotypical representation of women in film. | en | Arcadia | https://www.byarcadia.org/post/stereotypical-women-s-representation-in-the-film-industry | Media has always been a pillar of social change. It reflects political, social, and cultural values that align with beliefs in a specific society at a specific time, which in turn makes it a perfect medium to transmit messages to many people. Traditional media, such as newspapers, television, radio, or posters, are brought into the discussion regarding controversial topics or social change. The film industry usually lacks recognition as an important aspect of society's transformation, trends, and spread of values.
Additionally, films convey relevant messages on various topics,including romance, religion, family drama, and social challenges(Kumari & Joshi, 2015). They have the power to bring people closer together, yet they still manage to spread and support stereotypes that create underrepresentation. An analysis of the film industry through social theories reveals the gender-biased and stereotypical representation of women on screen, and the reasons behind it.
Women have been misrepresented for years while white men are overrepresented (Murphy, 2015). In general, women play a crucial role in various spheres of life, whether it is in the household, economic field, or motherhood. In order for women to be fully aware of their potential and their role in society, they should not be marginalized by male dominance. Media plays a key role in spreading awareness among women, uncovering their potential, challenging the male-dominated world and making further social change (Kumari & Joshi, 2015).
Theoretical framework and women behind the scenes
Historically, women were a part of the domestic sphere, while men were actively involved in public life. Women were denied access to education and had very limited job opportunities. Moreover, they were excluded from public life and could not vote (Britannica, n.d). Eventually, historical, social, and political advances prompted the appearance of feminism, the empowerment of women and the challenging of the male-dominated world. Even though there has been enormous work done by activists throughout the 20th century and many objectives have been accomplished, women still receive stereotypical misrepresentation in the media, and films are no exception (Murphy, 2015) . There are two social theories that set a theoretical framework which offer a better understanding of audiences' perception of gender representation in film. These theories are the social cognitive theory and the cultivation theory. The social cognitive theory claims that people start building their perceptions of the world through media consumption (Murphy, 2015). For instance, when people watch romantic films, they tend to project the relationships presented in the films onto real life and make certain assumptions about relationships. While observing the media, people create their own definitions and understandings of reward and punishment in real life situations (Murphy, 2015). Gender development is a complex issue, as various aspects such as sociocultural, social life, and working opportunities are influenced by gender representations valued in society and covered in the media.
The social cognitive theory states that instead of offering a realistic representation, media tends to encourage gender stereotypes in terms of personality characteristics, abilities and attitudes. Thus, both women and men are portrayed in a hyper-traditional manner. Moreover, the theory mentions that media content can have a passive and long-lasting effect on people and their perception of reality (Murphy, 2015).
Generally, there can be a list of overall themes that portray specific women's roles on screen. Firstly, women rarely take the role of a leading character. For example, in the US, in top-grossing films shown across the country in 2013, women were involved in less than a third of speaking parts, and only 15% of female characters were protagonists. Therefore, the low percentage of leading female characters in the film creates an imbalance between our perception of women in film and their actual roles and status in reality (Murphy, 2015).
Nulman (2014) analyzed the US's top twelve box office films from 1990-1999 to 2000-2009. The purpose was to define common themes of representing women and track changes in the film industry by perceiving female characters. One of the most common ways of portraying women on the big screen is by linking them romantically with the main characters. For instance, in Independence Day, there are three leading characters: the president, a marine, and a technician. These roles are played by male actors, while the main women characters represent the three love interests of the leading male characters. In this case, female characters can be viewed as supporting characters. Another theme is to represent women as adventure seekers. This image of female character is widespread in action movies, such as Men in Black, Transformers, and Pirates of the Caribbean. In action movies, female characters tend to be involved in dangerous activities and show their reckless side. For instance, in The Lord of Rings, a king's niece dresses up as a man to have an opportunity to be involved in the battle for her homeland (Nulman, 2014).
Finally, the third portrayal of women on screen is as someone who needs to be rescued. For example, during the 80s, there were few central female characters, and they rarely took the role of rescuers. Even though Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has a strong female character taking part in action, she does not save other characters. Another example is Ghostbusters, where the main female character becomes a victim of a ghost and needs someone's help. However, the film industry has made some progress throughout the decades. For instance, in The Lord of the Rings, female characters are shown as rescuers using their physical and intellectual abilities, which both break the gender barrier and show a new perspective of the female on the screen. Nevertheless, women's image as saviours is different from men's image of being a hero. Films still confine female ability to the sphere of love, sexuality, and maternal instinct. In contrast, the masculine act of rescuing is tied to knowledge and physical power. (Nulman, 2014).
Additionally, women are usually represented as over-emotional and powerless characters who lack ambition and are only able to have low-status jobs (Murphy, 2015). Even movies targeting female audiences offer a disappointing and stereotyped image of women (Murphy, 2015). Despite the rise of feminism throughout the 20th century and the appearance of empowered and independent female characters that shifted from a traditional image of women as housekeepers. The film industry spreads a misrepresentation of women, assuming that the audience has a stereotypical mindset and would enjoy seeing men and women have traditionally defined roles (Murphy, 2015). It is a rare case a female character is represented as a part of a working culture unless forced by circumstances. Most of the time, even educated women are shown as housewives, spending time at home and running errands. If they have a job, their working environment usually belongs to education and services ( Kumari & Joshi, 2015). As a result, there is still a big gap between male and female representation in film.
As a result, there is still a big gap between male and female representation in film. Significant change can be achieved only when women are portrayed equally in age, leadership positions, and aspirations, among other inequities. (Murphy, 2015).
One of the main reasons why women receive unequal coverage on the screen is because film is a male-dominated industry. It is noticeable that the majority of films are written, directed, and produced by men, which leads to fewer opportunities for female directors (Kunsey, 2019). Additionally, women do not get the spotlight as often as men do. In 2018, in the 100 highest-grossing films in the US only 36% of the leading characters were women. By 2022, the representation of women increased by 9%. Another reason for the lack of diversity in filmmaking is the difference in opportunity to produce between men and women. For example, female filmmakers present greater financial risks than males (Kunsey, 2019). Moreover, when dealing with big budgets, studio executives usually work with filmmakers who tend to have experience in the film industry, and they are usually men. Therefore, female directors do not receive the same budgets and resources as their male colleagues in the industry (Kinsey, 2019). Another approach is that male-directed films are generally more successful in the box office than female-directed ones. In the United States for example, Black Panther grossed $ 370 million as the top domestic film in 2018. In comparison, the top-grossing female-led film, A Wrinkle in Time, grossed more than $100 million at the US box office (Kunsey, 2019) Additionally, gender representation of key roles influences the visibility of women on screen, which is initially influenced by the director of the film. In other words, male-directed films have fewer female leading characters. In contrast, female directors cast more female protagonists (Kunsey, 2019).
Overall, the film industry offers a particular point of view of women through a patriarchal perspective. Women receive secondary and stereotypical representation tied to traditional roles of wives, lovers, and mothers. Additionally, women have more value in those roles than in being independent and intelligent. The film industry also portrays women as glorified beauty objects, symbolizing sex appeal and entertainment. (Rahman & Ullah, 2022). Even though gender stereotypes are still present in films, the industry has started progressing. Due to feminist movements, gender stereotypes are being challenged, and more complex characters appear on the big screens. Moreover, film production takes into consideration moviegoers' demographics to offer diverse and complex representations of various societal groups and minorities. (Murphy, 2015). Another approach is that women are an active part of the filmmaking process in contemporary society. Thus, female directors offer the audience an unbiased and realistic image of women that aligns with their actual status of them in society and have more leading women characters than in films directed by male filmmakers. (Kunsey, 2019). Finally, it is crucial to give female filmmakers more equal opportunities for production. Thus, women would receive greater recognition as directors and offer a fair representation of women that aligns with their status in contemporary society. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 31 | https://www.imdb.com/list/ls070653194/ | en | 25 Best Travel Movies Of All Time (Films That Will Inspire You To Travel) | [
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You can watch these films over & over again, and never get sick get sick of them. Nothing gets me more excited to travel than a good travel film. It gives you the inspiration and the motivation to a new destination.
So here is my personal list of the best travel movies of all time. Which ones are your favorites?
I started to realize I had a travel obsession when all my favorite movies were based on crazy travel adventures.
Once I’ve finished watching any of these films, I feel the instant urge to pack up everything and head out to explore the world. Great travel movies like these have inspired me a lot for my own personal travel goals over the years. | en | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/list/ls070653194/ | Into The Wild is the true story of Christopher McCandless, a recent college graduate who gives away his live savings and hitchhikes to Alaska. He meets all kinds of people along the way, each with their own stories. In Alaska, he heads out into the wilderness to live on his own. His life is filled with random adventures and experiences while he makes his way up to “The Last Frontier”. This is what travel is all about to me. Experiences, good and bad, make you who you are. And long term travel is FULL of new experiences. The key is to not completely get in over your head (like Christopher did).
The Way is a beautiful and inspiring tale about a father walking Spain’s Camino de Santiago trail to honor his recently dead son. The experience is an eye-opening an emotional one for him, as he’s forced to make friends with complete strangers and examine his life during the 800km journey. It features a very eclectic mix of characters, all walking the path for their own personal reasons. The movie certainly made me more interested in traveling along the Camino at some point in my life.
The Way is a heart-warming and beautiful story of a father who walked the Camino de Santiago trail in Spain, to honor his estranged son who recently died while trekking this trail. His experience was eye-opening and quite an emotional one, as he was compelled to make friends with total strangers as well as examine his life during his long 800 kilometer long journey. The film features a pretty eclectic blend of characters, all trekking the long trail for their own personal reasons.
180 Degrees South is a documentary that follows the adventure of a group of friends as they travel to Patagonia in the spirt of their heroes. They pack their surfboards and climbing gear as they sail and drive along the South American coast, learning about the losing battle against industrialization and the destruction of the natural world. Modern commercial interests fed by the growing human consumption of disposable goods is ruining our planet, and the film shows what some brave people are doing to try and stop it. The movie’s beautiful scenery and fantastic soundtrack mix together with a strong message and travel adventure to create a true work of art.
Essential Visuals: The Himalayas; temples in Jodhpur; Indian railways
Where It Takes You: India
The Darjeeling Limited is a wacky film about three wealthy, spoiled brothers taking an overland train trip through India. They haven’t spoken in a year, and the trip is supposed to heal and bond them again. Initially it all goes wrong as they bicker and fight with each other. They are all suffering from depression, and pop pain killers like candy. When it seems like nothing is going right, their crazy experiences along the way finally put things into perspective. The ultimate goal of healing and rejuvenation starts to happen. They finally start to grow up and turn into men. The movie is hilarious, and beautifully shot too. It will make you want to visit India.
Encounters At The End Of The World is an incredibly beautiful and funny movie about the people and animals who live in Antarctica. The film is done by Werner Herzog, one of my favorite directors. The individuals that work at the National Science Foundation research station are full of character, and most are permanent world travelers. Even if you’ve seen Discovery channel shows about Antarctica, this is totally different and fresh. I liked it much more than I thought I would, and it has earned a spot on my best travel movies list because as soon as it was over I wanted to pack up and head down there for a bit!
Where It Takes You: Ecuador (Esperanza and Tristeza)
Que Tan Lejos (How Much Further) is set in Ecuador, as Esperanza and Tristeza try to get from the capital city of Quito to the town of Cuenca. It is normally a 5 hour bus ride. The two women decide to hitchhike when local strikes force their bus to stop. One girl is a local trying to stop the love of her life from getting married, while the other is a tourist from Spain. Along the way, they learn from each other while meeting interesting people who help them re-evaluate the purpose of their journeys. The film is filled with beautiful scenery from Ecuador, and gives an authentic portrayal of life in that country.
Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world,” sang the Beach Boys; and if ever a film embodied that mindset, it’s Bruce Brown’s 1966 surfer documentary. Brown shadowed buddies Robert August and Mike Hynson on a round-the-world surfing trip, filming their travels to places like Hawaii, New Zealand, and South Africa as they crested waves and met like-minded surf obsessives. The film’s impact on surf culture and tourism was huge, thanks in no small part to Brown’s cinematography, as well as the subjects’ ability to make riding those impossibly large waves seem effortless
This 1966 classic has a cult following, and deservedly so; it spiraled an entire surf and travel subculture, and has been inspiring travelers for the past 50 years. The film follows surfers around the globe as they search to continue summer surfing beyond the summer months. Their travels are what any traveler could wish on such a journey; exotic locations, cultural exchanges and lessons, and plenty of good stories along the way.
Ever think of trading out the American dream of white picket fences and suburban houses for an adventure? The 2008 film The Art of Travel shows a man who does just that after finding out his long time sweetheart and fiancee is cheating on him. Abandoning the past and in an attempt to move forward, he takes his honeymoon alone. The result is an adventure of self discovery and the true meaning and mastering of wanderlust as he and a group of adventurers try to race across the Darien Gap.
Travel lovers everywhere will be inspired by the cinematography as the hero travels through the miles of the South and Central American rainforest. The film also does a fantastic job of depicting the struggle every traveler feels in their soul at the thought of returning to what is familiar after having experienced the challenges the world has waiting for you.
A Map For Saturday is a travel documentary that follows one man as he quits his cushy job with HBO to travel around the world for a year and live out of his backpack. It shows the different ways people travel, and gives an accurate picture of what it is like to vagabond around the world long term. You get to experience both the ups and downs of his trip at a very personal level. If you ever thought of doing something like this, the movie will show you what the experience is really like. It also shows you that anyone can travel cheaply if they really want to. The only thing stopping you is, well, you.
A few months before their baby is due, Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski) decide to take a road trip to find the perfect location to raise their family. Their journey takes them from Phoenix and Tucson to Madison and Montreal, a city that has never seemed more friendly or inviting. The movie is a wonderful tour of North America’s cities, as well as a touching tribute to love and family.
John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph play expectant parents in director Sam Mendes's 2009 flick. Verona (Rudolph) and Burt (Krasinski) travel across the continent searching for where they should settle down to raise their unborn baby. They visit friends along the way, learning about the type of parents they'd like to be and despite Verona's hesitation to get married, pledge they'll always be there for each other. In his review of the film, Globe film critic Wesley Morris wrote that it "is a road movie for idealists.
Away We Go is story of discovery and interaction with different lifestyles of people across the world, and a look into the different kind of lives we can choose to live. The story follows a couple who is expecting their first child; upon learning they are pregnant, they decide to travel across North America to try to find the kind of culture and life they wish their child to grow up in. The film does well at inspiring you to not settle to be like the people around you, but to make your own path. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 28 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty | en | Wikipedia | [
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] | 2001-10-15T12:40:47+00:00 | en | /static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty | Characteristic that provides pleasure or satisfaction
For other uses, see Beauty (disambiguation).
Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes them pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, art and taste are the main subjects of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy. As a positive aesthetic value, it is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart.
One difficulty in understanding beauty is that it has both objective and subjective aspects: it is seen as a property of things but also as depending on the emotional response of observers. Because of its subjective side, beauty is said to be "in the eye of the beholder".[2] It has been argued that the ability on the side of the subject needed to perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as the "sense of taste", can be trained and that the verdicts of experts coincide in the long run. This suggests the standards of validity of judgments of beauty are intersubjective, i.e. dependent on a group of judges, rather than fully subjective or objective.
Conceptions of beauty aim to capture what is essential to all beautiful things. Classical conceptions define beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. Hedonist conceptions see a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause disinterested pleasure. Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude toward them or of their function.
Overview
Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy.[3][4] Beauty is usually categorized as an aesthetic property besides other properties, like grace, elegance or the sublime.[5][6][7] As a positive aesthetic value, beauty is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Beauty is often listed as one of the three fundamental concepts of human understanding besides truth and goodness.[5][8][6]
Objectivists or realists see beauty as an objective or mind-independent feature of beautiful things, which is denied by subjectivists.[3][9] The source of this debate is that judgments of beauty seem to be based on subjective grounds, namely our feelings, while claiming universal correctness at the same time.[10] This tension is sometimes referred to as the "antinomy of taste".[4] Adherents of both sides have suggested that a certain faculty, commonly called a sense of taste, is necessary for making reliable judgments about beauty.[3][10] David Hume, for example, suggests that this faculty can be trained and that the verdicts of experts coincide in the long run.[3][9]
Beauty is mainly discussed in relation to concrete objects accessible to sensory perception. It has been suggested that the beauty of a thing supervenes on the sensory features of this thing.[10] It has also been proposed that abstract objects like stories or mathematical proofs can be beautiful.[11] Beauty plays a central role in works of art and nature.[12][10]
An influential distinction among beautiful things, according to Immanuel Kant, is that between adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens)[note 1] and free beauty (pulchritudo vaga). A thing has adherent beauty if its beauty depends on the conception or function of this thing, unlike free or absolute beauty.[10] Examples of adherent beauty include an ox which is beautiful as an ox but not beautiful as a horse[3] or a photograph which is beautiful, because it depicts a beautiful building but that lacks beauty generally speaking because of its low quality.[9]
Objectivism and subjectivism
Further information: objectivity and subjectivity
Judgments of beauty seem to occupy an intermediary position between objective judgments, e.g. concerning the mass and shape of a grapefruit, and subjective likes, e.g. concerning whether the grapefruit tastes good.[13][10][9] Judgments of beauty differ from the former because they are based on subjective feelings rather than objective perception. But they also differ from the latter because they lay claim on universal correctness.[10] This tension is also reflected in common language. On the one hand, we talk about beauty as an objective feature of the world that is ascribed, for example, to landscapes, paintings or humans.[14] The subjective side, on the other hand, is expressed in sayings like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".[3]
These two positions are often referred to as objectivism (or realism) and subjectivism.[3] Objectivism is the traditional view, while subjectivism developed more recently in western philosophy. Objectivists hold that beauty is a mind-independent feature of things. On this account, the beauty of a landscape is independent of who perceives it or whether it is perceived at all.[3][9] Disagreements may be explained by an inability to perceive this feature, sometimes referred to as a "lack of taste".[15] Subjectivism, on the other hand, denies the mind-independent existence of beauty.[5][3][9] Influential for the development of this position was John Locke's distinction between primary qualities, which the object has independent of the observer, and secondary qualities, which constitute powers in the object to produce certain ideas in the observer.[3][16][5] When applied to beauty, there is still a sense in which it depends on the object and its powers.[9] But this account makes the possibility of genuine disagreements about claims of beauty implausible, since the same object may produce very different ideas in distinct observers. The notion of "taste" can still be used to explain why different people disagree about what is beautiful, but there is no objectively right or wrong taste, there are just different tastes.[3]
The problem with both the objectivist and the subjectivist position in their extreme form is that each has to deny some intuitions about beauty. This issue is sometimes discussed under the label "antinomy of taste".[3][4] It has prompted various philosophers to seek a unified theory that can take all these intuitions into account. One promising route to solve this problem is to move from subjective to intersubjective theories, which hold that the standards of validity of judgments of taste are intersubjective or dependent on a group of judges rather than objective. This approach tries to explain how genuine disagreement about beauty is possible despite the fact that beauty is a mind-dependent property, dependent not on an individual but a group.[3][4] A closely related theory sees beauty as a secondary or response-dependent property.[9] On one such account, an object is beautiful "if it causes pleasure by virtue of its aesthetic properties".[5] The problem that different people respond differently can be addressed by combining response-dependence theories with so-called ideal-observer theories: it only matters how an ideal observer would respond.[10] There is no general agreement on how "ideal observers" are to be defined, but it is usually assumed that they are experienced judges of beauty with a fully developed sense of taste. This suggests an indirect way of solving the antinomy of taste: instead of looking for necessary and sufficient conditions of beauty itself, one can learn to identify the qualities of good critics and rely on their judgments.[3] This approach only works if unanimity among experts was ensured. But even experienced judges may disagree in their judgments, which threatens to undermine ideal-observer theories.[3][9]
Conceptions
Various conceptions of the essential features of beautiful things have been proposed but there is no consensus as to which is the right one.
Classical
The "classical conception" (see Classicism) defines beauty in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole.[3][5][9] On this account, which found its most explicit articulation in the Italian Renaissance, the beauty of a human body, for example, depends, among other things, on the right proportion of the different parts of the body and on the overall symmetry.[3] One problem with this conception is that it is difficult to give a general and detailed description of what is meant by "harmony between parts" and raises the suspicion that defining beauty through harmony results in exchanging one unclear term for another one.[3] Some attempts have been made to dissolve this suspicion by searching for laws of beauty, like the golden ratio.
18th century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, for example, saw laws of beauty in analogy with laws of nature and believed that they could be discovered through empirical research.[5] As of 2003, these attempts have failed to find a general definition of beauty and several authors take the opposite claim that such laws cannot be formulated, as part of their definition of beauty.[10]
Hedonism
Main article: Hedonism
A very common element in many conceptions of beauty is its relation to pleasure.[11][5] Hedonism makes this relation part of the definition of beauty by holding that there is a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause pleasure or that the experience of beauty is always accompanied by pleasure.[12] This account is sometimes labeled as "aesthetic hedonism" in order to distinguish it from other forms of hedonism.[17][18] An influential articulation of this position comes from Thomas Aquinas, who treats beauty as "that which pleases in the very apprehension of it".[19] Immanuel Kant explains this pleasure through a harmonious interplay between the faculties of understanding and imagination.[11] A further question for hedonists is how to explain the relation between beauty and pleasure. This problem is akin to the Euthyphro dilemma: is something beautiful because we enjoy it or do we enjoy it because it is beautiful?[5] Identity theorists solve this problem by denying that there is a difference between beauty and pleasure: they identify beauty, or the appearance of it, with the experience of aesthetic pleasure.[11]
Hedonists usually restrict and specify the notion of pleasure in various ways in order to avoid obvious counterexamples. One important distinction in this context is the difference between pure and mixed pleasure.[11] Pure pleasure excludes any form of pain or unpleasant feeling while the experience of mixed pleasure can include unpleasant elements.[20] But beauty can involve mixed pleasure, for example, in the case of a beautifully tragic story, which is why mixed pleasure is usually allowed in hedonist conceptions of beauty.[11]
Another problem faced by hedonist theories is that we take pleasure from many things that are not beautiful. One way to address this issue is to associate beauty with a special type of pleasure: aesthetic or disinterested pleasure.[3][4][7] A pleasure is disinterested if it is indifferent to the existence of the beautiful object or if it did not arise owing to an antecedent desire through means-end reasoning.[21][11] For example, the joy of looking at a beautiful landscape would still be valuable if it turned out that this experience was an illusion, which would not be true if this joy was due to seeing the landscape as a valuable real estate opportunity.[3] Opponents of hedonism usually concede that many experiences of beauty are pleasurable but deny that this is true for all cases.[12] For example, a cold jaded critic may still be a good judge of beauty because of her years of experience but lack the joy that initially accompanied her work.[11] One way to avoid this objection is to allow responses to beautiful things to lack pleasure while insisting that all beautiful things merit pleasure, that aesthetic pleasure is the only appropriate response to them.[12]
Others
G. E. Moore explained beauty in regard to intrinsic value as "that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself".[21][5] This definition connects beauty to experience while managing to avoid some of the problems usually associated with subjectivist positions since it allows that things may be beautiful even if they are never experienced.[21]
Another subjectivist theory of beauty comes from George Santayana, who suggested that we project pleasure onto the things we call "beautiful". So in a process akin to a category mistake, one treats one's subjective pleasure as an objective property of the beautiful thing.[11][3][5] Other conceptions include defining beauty in terms of a loving or longing attitude toward the beautiful object or in terms of its usefulness or function.[3][22] In 1871, functionalist Charles Darwin explained beauty as result of accumulative sexual selection in "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex".[5]
In philosophy
Greco-Roman tradition
The classical Greek noun that best translates to the English-language words "beauty" or "beautiful" was κάλλος, kallos, and the adjective was καλός, kalos. This is also translated as "good" or "of fine quality" and thus has a broader meaning than mere physical or material beauty. Similarly, kallos was used differently from the English word beauty in that it first and foremost applied to humans and bears an erotic connotation.[23] The Koine Greek word for beautiful was ὡραῖος, hōraios,[24] an adjective etymologically coming from the word ὥρα, hōra, meaning "hour". In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with "being of one's hour".[25] Thus, a ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a young woman trying to appear older or an older woman trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful. In Attic Greek, hōraios had many meanings, including "youthful" and "ripe old age".[25] Another classical term in use to describe beauty was pulchrum (Latin).[26]
Beauty for ancient thinkers existed both in form, which is the material world as it is, and as embodied in the spirit, which is the world of mental formations.[27] Greek mythology mentions Helen of Troy as the most beautiful woman.[28][29][30][31][32] Ancient Greek architecture is based on this view of symmetry and proportion.
Pre-Socratic
In one fragment of Heraclitus's writings (Fragment 106) he mentions beauty, this reads: "To God all things are beautiful, good, right..."[33] The earliest Western theory of beauty can be found in the works of early Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratic period, such as Pythagoras, who conceived of beauty as useful for a moral education of the soul.[34] He wrote of how people experience pleasure when aware of a certain type of formal situation present in reality, perceivable by sight or through the ear[35] and discovered the underlying mathematical ratios in the harmonic scales in music.[34] The Pythagoreans conceived of the presence of beauty in universal terms, which is, as existing in a cosmological state, they observed beauty in the heavens.[27] They saw a strong connection between mathematics and beauty. In particular, they noted that objects proportioned according to the golden ratio seemed more attractive.[36]
Classical period
The classical concept of beauty is one that exhibits perfect proportion (Wolfflin).[37] In this context, the concept belonged often within the discipline of mathematics.[26] An idea of spiritual beauty emerged during the classical period,[27] beauty was something embodying divine goodness, while the demonstration of behaviour which might be classified as beautiful, from an inner state of morality which is aligned to the good.[38]
The writing of Xenophon shows a conversation between Socrates and Aristippus. Socrates discerned differences in the conception of the beautiful, for example, in inanimate objects, the effectiveness of execution of design was a deciding factor on the perception of beauty in something.[27] By the account of Xenophon, Socrates found beauty congruent with that to which was defined as the morally good, in short, he thought beauty coincident with the good.[39]
Beauty is a subject of Plato in his work Symposium.[34] In the work, the high priestess Diotima describes how beauty moves out from a core singular appreciation of the body to outer appreciations via loved ones, to the world in its state of culture and society (Wright).[35] In other words, Diotoma gives to Socrates an explanation of how love should begin with erotic attachment, and end with the transcending of the physical to an appreciation of beauty as a thing in itself. The ascent of love begins with one's own body, then secondarily, in appreciating beauty in another's body, thirdly beauty in the soul, which cognates to beauty in the mind in the modern sense, fourthly beauty in institutions, laws and activities, fifthly beauty in knowledge, the sciences, and finally to lastly love beauty itself, which translates to the original Greek language term as auto to kalon.[40] In the final state, auto to kalon and truth are united as one.[41] There is the sense in the text, concerning love and beauty they both co-exist but are still independent or, in other words, mutually exclusive, since love does not have beauty since it seeks beauty.[42] The work toward the end provides a description of beauty in a negative sense.[42]
Plato also discusses beauty in his work Phaedrus,[41] and identifies Alcibiades as beautiful in Parmenides.[43] He considered beauty to be the Idea (Form) above all other Ideas.[44] Platonic thought synthesized beauty with the divine.[35] Scruton (cited: Konstan) states Plato states of the idea of beauty, of it (the idea), being something inviting desirousness (c.f seducing), and, promotes an intellectual renunciation (c.f. denouncing) of desire.[45] For Alexander Nehamas, it is only the locating of desire to which the sense of beauty exists, in the considerations of Plato.[46]
Aristotle defines beauty in Metaphysics as having order, symmetry and definiteness which the mathematical sciences exhibit to a special degree.[37] He saw a relationship between the beautiful (to kalon) and virtue, arguing that "Virtue aims at the beautiful."[47]
Roman
In De Natura Deorum Cicero wrote: "the splendour and beauty of creation", in respect to this, and all the facets of reality resulting from creation, he postulated these to be a reason to see the existence of a God as creator.[48]
Western Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, Catholic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas included beauty among the transcendental attributes of being.[49] In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas described the three conditions of beauty as: integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony and proportion), and claritas (a radiance and clarity that makes the form of a thing apparent to the mind).[50]
In the Gothic Architecture of the High and Late Middle Ages, light was considered the most beautiful revelation of God, which was heralded in design.[1] Examples are the stained glass of Gothic Cathedrals including Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres Cathedral.[51]
St. Augustine said of beauty "Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked."[52]
Renaissance
Classical philosophy and sculptures of men and women produced according to the Greek philosophers' tenets of ideal human beauty were rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, leading to a re-adoption of what became known as a "classical ideal". In terms of female human beauty, a woman whose appearance conforms to these tenets is still called a "classical beauty" or said to possess a "classical beauty", whilst the foundations laid by Greek and Roman artists have also supplied the standard for male beauty and female beauty in western civilization as seen, for example, in the Winged Victory of Samothrace. During the Gothic era, the classical aesthetical canon of beauty was rejected as sinful. Later, Renaissance and Humanist thinkers rejected this view, and considered beauty to be the product of rational order and harmonious proportions. Renaissance artists and architects (such as Giorgio Vasari in his "Lives of Artists") criticised the Gothic period as irrational and barbarian. This point of view of Gothic art lasted until Romanticism, in the 19th century. Vasari aligned himself to the classical notion and thought of beauty as defined as arising from proportion and order.[38]
Age of Reason
The Age of Reason saw a rise in an interest in beauty as a philosophical subject. For example, Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson argued that beauty is "unity in variety and variety in unity".[54] He wrote that beauty was neither purely subjective nor purely objective—it could be understood not as "any Quality suppos'd to be in the Object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it: For Beauty, like other Names of sensible Ideas, properly denotes the Perception of some mind; ... however we generally imagine that there is something in the Object just like our Perception."[55]
Immanuel Kant believed that there could be no "universal criterion of the beautiful" and that the experience of beauty is subjective, but that an object is judged to be beautiful when it seems to display "purposiveness"; that is, when its form is perceived to have the character of a thing designed according to some principle and fitted for a purpose.[56] He distinguished "free beauty" from "merely adherent beauty", explaining that "the first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith."[57] By this definition, free beauty is found in seashells and wordless music; adherent beauty in buildings and the human body.[57]
The Romantic poets, too, became highly concerned with the nature of beauty, with John Keats arguing in Ode on a Grecian Urn that:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Western 19th and 20th century
In the Romantic period, Edmund Burke postulated a difference between beauty in its classical meaning and the sublime.[58] The concept of the sublime, as explicated by Burke and Kant, suggested viewing Gothic art and architecture, though not in accordance with the classical standard of beauty, as sublime.[59]
The 20th century saw an increasing rejection of beauty by artists and philosophers alike, culminating in postmodernism's anti-aesthetics.[60] This is despite beauty being a central concern of one of postmodernism's main influences, Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that the Will to Power was the Will to Beauty.[61]
In the aftermath of postmodernism's rejection of beauty, thinkers have returned to beauty as an important value. American analytic philosopher Guy Sircello proposed his New Theory of Beauty as an effort to reaffirm the status of beauty as an important philosophical concept.[62][63] He rejected the subjectivism of Kant and sought to identify the properties inherent in an object that make it beautiful. He called qualities such as vividness, boldness, and subtlety "properties of qualitative degree" (PQDs) and stated that a PQD makes an object beautiful if it is not—and does not create the appearance of—"a property of deficiency, lack, or defect"; and if the PQD is strongly present in the object.[64]
Elaine Scarry argues that beauty is related to justice.[65]
Beauty is also studied by psychologists and neuroscientists in the field of experimental aesthetics and neuroesthetics respectively. Psychological theories see beauty as a form of pleasure.[66][67] Correlational findings support the view that more beautiful objects are also more pleasing.[68][69][70] Some studies suggest that higher experienced beauty is associated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.[71][72] This approach of localizing the processing of beauty in one brain region has received criticism within the field.[73]
Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea (2004)[74][75] and On Ugliness (2007).[76] The narrator of his novel The Name of the Rose follows Aquinas in declaring: "three things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason, we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light", before going on to say "the sight of the beautiful implies peace".[77][78] Mike Phillips has described Umberto Eco's On Beauty as "incoherent" and criticized him for focusing only on Western European history and devoting none of his book to Eastern European, Asian, or African history.[75] Amy Finnerty described Eco's work On Ugliness favorably. [79]
Chinese philosophy
Chinese philosophy has traditionally not made a separate discipline of the philosophy of beauty.[80] Confucius identified beauty with goodness, and considered a virtuous personality to be the greatest of beauties: In his philosophy, "a neighborhood with a ren man in it is a beautiful neighborhood."[81] Confucius's student Zeng Shen expressed a similar idea: "few men could see the beauty in some one whom they dislike."[81] Mencius considered "complete truthfulness" to be beauty.[82] Zhu Xi said: "When one has strenuously implemented goodness until it is filled to completion and has accumulated truth, then the beauty will reside within it and will not depend on externals."[82]
Human attributes
Main articles: Physical attractiveness and Feminine beauty ideal
The word "beauty" is often[how often?] used as a countable noun to describe a beautiful woman.[83][84]
The characterization of a person as "beautiful", whether on an individual basis or by community consensus, is often[how often?] based on some combination of inner beauty, which includes psychological factors such as personality, intelligence, grace, politeness, charisma, integrity, congruence and elegance, and outer beauty (i.e. physical attractiveness) which includes physical attributes which are valued on an aesthetic basis.[citation needed]
Standards of beauty have changed over time, based on changing cultural values. Historically, paintings show a wide range of different standards for beauty.[85][86]
A strong indicator of physical beauty is "averageness".[87][88] When images of human faces are averaged together to form a composite image, they become progressively closer to the "ideal" image and are perceived as more attractive. This was first noticed in 1883, when Francis Galton overlaid photographic composite images of the faces of vegetarians and criminals to see if there was a typical facial appearance for each. When doing this, he noticed that the composite images were more attractive as compared to any of the individual images.[89] Researchers have replicated the result under more controlled conditions and found that the computer-generated, mathematical average of a series of faces is rated more favorably than individual faces.[90] It is argued that it is evolutionarily advantageous that sexual creatures are attracted to mates who possess predominantly common or average features, because it suggests the absence of genetic or acquired defects.[91][92][93]
Since the 1970's there has been increasing evidence that a preference for beautiful faces emerges early in infancy, and is probably innate,[94][95][96] and that the rules by which attractiveness is established are similar across different genders and cultures.[97][98]
A feature of beautiful women which has been explored by researchers is a waist–hip ratio of approximately 0.70. As of 2004, physiologists had shown that women with hourglass figures were more fertile than other women because of higher levels of certain female hormones, a fact that may subconsciously condition males choosing mates.[99][100] In 2008, other commentators have suggested that this preference may not be universal. For instance, in some non-Western cultures in which women have to do work such as finding food, men tend to have preferences for higher waist-hip ratios.[101][102][103]
Exposure to the thin ideal in mass media, such as fashion magazines, directly correlates with body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, and the development of eating disorders among female viewers.[104][105] Further, the widening gap between individual body sizes and societal ideals continues to breed anxiety among young girls as they grow, highlighting the dangerous nature of beauty standards in society.[106]
Western concept
A study using Chinese immigrants and Hispanic, Black and White American citizens found that their ideals of female beauty were not significantly different.[109] Participants in the study rated Asian and Latina women as more attractive than White and Black women, and it was found that Asian and Latina women had more of the attributes that were considered attractive for women.[110] Exposure to Western media did not influence or improve the Asian men's ratings of White women.[111]
One study found that East Asian women in the United States are closer to the ideal figure promoted in Western media, and that East Asian women conform to both Western and Eastern influences in the United States.[112][113] East Asian men were found to be more impacted by Western beauty ideals then East Asian women, in the United States. East Asian men felt as though their bodies were not large enough and therefore deviated from the Western norm.[114] East Asian men and white Western women were found to have the highest levels of body dissatisfaction in the United States.[115] A study of African American and South Asian women found that some had internalized a white beauty ideal that placed light skin and straight hair at the top.[116]
Eurocentric standards for men include tallness, leanness, and muscularity, which have been idolized through American media, such as in Hollywood films and magazine covers.[117]
In of the United States, African Americans have historically been subjected to beauty ideals that often do not reflect their own appearance, which can lead to issues of low self-esteem. African-American philosopher Cornel West elaborates that, "much of black self-hatred and self-contempt has to do with the refusal of many black Americans to love their own black bodies-especially their black noses, hips, lips, and hair."[118] According to Patton (2006), the stereotype of African-American women's inferiority (relative to other races of women) maintains a system of oppression based on race and gender that operates to the detriment of women of all races, and also black men.[119] In the 1960s, the black is beautiful cultural movement sought to dispel the notion of a Eurocentric concept of beauty.[120]
Much criticism has been directed at models of beauty which depend solely upon Western ideals of beauty, as seen, for example, in the Barbie franchise. Criticisms of Barbie are often centered around concerns that children consider Barbie a role model of beauty and will attempt to emulate her. One of the most common criticisms of Barbie is that she promotes an unrealistic idea of body image for a young woman, leading to a risk that girls who attempt to emulate her will become anorexic.[121]
As of 1998, these criticisms of the lack of diversity in such franchises as the Barbie model of beauty in Western culture, had led to a dialogue to create non-exclusive models of Western ideals in body type for young girls who do not match the thinness ideal that Barbie represents.[122] Mattel responded to these criticisms.
In East Asian cultures, familial pressures and cultural norms shape beauty ideals. A 2017 experimental study concluded that Asian cultural idealization of "fragile" girls was impacting Asian American women's lifestyle, eating, and appearance choices.[123]
Effects on society
Researchers have found that good-looking students get higher grades from their teachers than students with an ordinary appearance.[124] Some studies using mock criminal trials have shown that physically attractive "defendants" are less likely to be convicted—and if convicted are likely to receive lighter sentences—than less attractive ones (although the opposite effect was observed when the alleged crime was swindling, perhaps because jurors perceived the defendant's attractiveness as facilitating the crime).[125] Studies among teens and young adults, such as those of psychiatrist and self-help author Eva Ritvo show that skin conditions have a profound effect on social behavior and opportunity.[126]
How much money a person earns may also be influenced by physical beauty. One study found that people low in physical attractiveness earn 5 to 10 percent less than ordinary-looking people, who in turn earn 3 to 8 percent less than those who are considered good-looking.[127] In the market for loans, the least attractive people are less likely to get approvals, although they are less likely to default. In the marriage market, women's looks are at a premium, but men's looks do not matter much.[128] The impact of physical attractiveness on earnings varies across races, with the largest beauty wage gap among black women and black men.[129]
Conversely, being very unattractive increases the individual's propensity for criminal activity for a number of crimes ranging from burglary to theft to selling illicit drugs.[130]
Discrimination against others based on their appearance is known as lookism.[131]
See also
Adornment
Aesthetics
Beauty pageant
Body modification
Feminine beauty ideal
Glamour (presentation)
Masculine beauty ideal
Mathematical beauty
Processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure
Unattractiveness
Cosmetics
Notes
References
Further reading
Richard O. Prum (2018). The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us. Anchor. ISBN 978-0345804570.
Liebelt, C. (2022), Beauty: What Makes Us Dream, What Haunts Us. Feminist Anthropology. | ||||||
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] | 2023-08-20T14:55:00+00:00 | A list of the best gangster movies of all time, including obvious favorites like Goodfellas and The Godfather with surprises in between. | en | https://s.studiobinder.com/wp-content/uploads/favicon.ico | StudioBinder | https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/best-gangster-movies-of-all-time/ | No genre has influenced the public’s perception of criminals more than Gangster Movies. For more than 80 years, the best gangster movies have fascinated and allured the minds of millions; from Prohibition-era pre-code crime to 21st Century gang life. Our list of the 30 best gangster movies of all time includes films that span the globe and were produced in different time periods, with very different budgets.
Whether sensational like De Palma’s Scarface or grounded like Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, audiences have grown to see gangsters in new ways. But their binding similarity is that they are each responsible for shaping the publics’ view of gangsters.
GOOD MODERN GANGSTER MOVIES
30. American Gangster (2007)
American Gangster • Trailer
What better way to begin than with a film with the genre in the name? The eponymous American Gangster had a strong showing at the box office in 2007, grossing over $266 million on a $100 million budget. The film was directed by Ridley Scott, written by Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List), and starred Denzel Washington.
The plot of the film takes place mostly in the 1960s, which gives American Gangster the unique perspective of being able to look back at 20th-century crime from the present. The result is a blockbuster film somewhere between popcorn filler and violent think-piece.
IN CONCLUSION
AMERICAN GANGSTER
Accolades: Two Oscar Nominations (Best Supporting Actor and Best Art Direction)
Tomatometer: 80%
FAMOUS NEW YORK GANGSTER MOVIES
29. King of New York (1990)
"What's in the Cup!" • King of New York
King of New York is a film that fits into the stylistic tone of other New York City underworld movies, Escape from New York and Good Time. The use of color; like neon deep blues, gives this sub-genre an interesting visual tone.
King of New York is a film with an all-star cast, headed by lead actor Christopher Walken. This gangster crime movie raises points about the “Robin Hood” nature of gangsters, and how gangsters sometimes envision themselves as heroes.
IN CONCLUSION
KING OF NEW YORK
Accolades: Film Independent — One Nomination (Best Cinematography)
Tomatometer: 71%
CLASSIC IRISH GANGSTER MOVIES
28. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)
The Friends of Eddie Coyle • Critics' Pick
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the first great Boston mob films. Boston has a unique perspective within gangster movies because of the city’s long history with Irish, Italian, and African-American gangs.
This particular story is about the dealings of the Irish mob, partially inspired by Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang. The Friends of Eddie Coyle shot entirely on location in the Massachusetts area and is one of the most authentic gangster films ever made.
IN CONCLUSION
THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE
Accolades: Entered into the Criterion Collection in 2009.
Tomatometer: 100%
GOOD 21ST CENTURY GANGSTER MOVIES
27. Killing Them Softly (2012)
Killing Them Softly • Banned Trailer
The most modern gangster film on this list, Killing Them Softly addresses the impact of organized crime on American society after the collapse of the housing market. It also happens to be one of the best crime movies.
The themes of questioning loyalty and escape from poverty are shown in new and modern lights. It's one of the best Brad Pitt movies and James Gandolfini also gives an excellent performance. The last scene, although divisive among viewers, is one that has stuck with me for years.
IN CONCLUSION
KILLING THEM SOFTLY
Accolades: Cannes Palme d’Or Nominee
Tomatometer: 73%
CLASSIC GANGSTER MOVIES LIST
26. The Untouchables (1987)
The Untouchables • Trailer
Anchored by an incredible cast and helmed by Brian De Palma, The Untouchables is one of the most iconic gangster films ever made. Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and Robert De Niro all turn in incredible performances. The Untouchables is a Prohibition-era crime film that mixes police procedural and thriller to a satisfying degree.
IN CONCLUSION
THE UNTOUCHABLES
Accolades: Academy Awards — 3 Nominations (Best Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score) and 1 Win (Best Supporting Actor for Sean Connery)
Tomatometer: 82%
KUBRICK’S GANGSTER MOVIE
25. The Killing (1956)
"Worth the Risk" Scene • The Killing
There are heist movies and there are gangster movies, and then there’s Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. Kubrick’s 3rd film, The Killing, has given enormous inspiration to the likes of Reservoir Dogs, The Usual Suspects, and Logan Lucky.
The picture follows a career criminal's last dance of stealing $2,000,000 at the racetrack. But, of course, complications arise. The Killing also shares many similarities to the 1955 film, Rafifi; both films exist in a transitional space between “Hollywood” gangster movies and film noir. Fun fact: Rafifi was a French film but it was made by a blacklisted Hollywood filmmaker.
IN CONCLUSION
THE KILLING
Accolades: BAFTA Awards — 1 Nomination (Best Film)
Tomatometer: 97%
ITALIAN GANGSTER MOVIES
24. Mafioso (1962)
Mafioso • Trailer
Mafioso is the film that kick-started the American fascination with Mafia movies. Alberto Sordi delivers an incredible performance that balances comedy and tragedy effortlessly.
Although nearly 60 years old, the themes of Mafioso still ring true today. In the first part of the film, the social and cultural distinctions between the North (Milan) and the South (Sicily) are portrayed beautifully.
From costuming to dialogue, everything is expertly crafted. In the second part, a tonal shift makes Sordi’s character despaired, haunted by the ghost of a life of crime. In Mafioso, the mafia renders a person into a cog within a machine, and watching that happen is more fascinating now than ever.
IN CONCLUSION
MAFIOSO
Accolades: Entered into The Criterion Collection in 2013.
Tomatometer: 96%
TOP MIAMI GANGSTER MOVIES
23. Scarface (1983)
"Say hello to my little friend!" • Scarface
Brian De Palma’s remake of the 1932 film of the same name, is bigger, bolder, and better. Pacino turns in an over the top performance in all the right ways. The 1983 Scarface was also significant for its style.
Television shows like Miami Vice and games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City would go on to draw heavy inspiration from Scarface in constructing their own vision of Miami crime.
IN CONCLUSION
SCARFACE
Accolades: Golden Globes — 3 Nominations (Best Actor, Supporting Actor, and Original Score).
Tomatometer: 81%
HOOD GANGSTER MOVIES
22. Menace II Society (1993)
Menace II Society • Trailer
Menace II Society is one of the great Los Angeles gangster movies. Released just one year after the ‘92 LA riots, Menace II Society spoke sympathy to some and stoked the fire for others. Nonetheless, The Hughes Brothers directorial debut is one of the most essential gangster films ever made.
IN CONCLUSION
Menace II Society
Accolades: Cannes Golden Camera Nominee
Tomatometer: 84%
SCORSESE GANGSTER MOVIES LIST
21. Mean Streets (1973)
Mean Streets • Trailer
Martin Scorsese’s third directorial feature Mean Streets is one of his most influential. Scorsese said that he was attracted to the idea of making films about him and his friends. He even compared himself to De Niro’s character Johnny Boy, the irresponsible fool of the film.
The film takes place in Little Italy, NY, and puts Scorsese’s experiences in the neighborhood front and center. There’s mafia, police corruption, and crime in spades. What more would one expect from a Scorsese gangster picture?
IN CONCLUSION
MEAN STREETS
Accolades: Entered into the National Film Preservation Registry in 1997
Tomatometer: 97%
FAMOUS GANGSTER CRIME MOVIES
20. Donnie Brasco (1997)
"This is Life and Death" Scene • Donnie Brasco
Donnie Brasco is a good mafia movie elevated by extraordinary performances from Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. It tells the story of Mafia crime in the 1970s from two perspectives; the FBI and the mob.
Depp finds a rare balance of emotional depth in playing a dual role as an FBI agent (Joseph Pistone) who becomes someone new after infiltrating the mob (Donnie Brasco). This is also inspired by a true story which lends a sense of credence and authenticity to the film.
IN CONCLUSION
DONNIE BRASCO
Accolades: Academy Awards — 1 Nomination (Best Adapted Screenplay)
Tomatometer: 88%
GREATEST BRITISH GANGSTER MOVIES
19. Snatch (2001)
"I'll Fight Ya For It" Scene • Snatch
Guy Ritchie made an explosive entrance to the world of cinema with his debut film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
But in his second film Snatch, Ritchie improves on the British Gangster formula with an all-star cast and heavy stylization.
Brad Pitt steals the show as a gypsy prizefighter. Much of the movie is about the different sects of British gangs — “pikeys,” bookies, and London crooks. There’s even an element of international gang commentary between Irish and British. This is all packed into 100 minutes of violent crime and rollicking fun.
IN CONCLUSION
SNATCH
Accolades: Entered into the National Board of Review for excellence in filmmaking.
Tomatometer: 73%
IRISH GANGSTER CRIME MOVIES
18. The General (1998)
The General • Trailer
Paranoia seeps into the mind of gangster Martin Cahill (Brendan Gleeson) like a drug by the end of The General. After drawing the ire of the IRA with his business dealings, Cahill is forced to reflect on a lifetime of mischief and crime.
This is an authentic Irish film that portrays authentic Irish crime; such as the crimes of the Catholic church and the corruption of the police. Cahill is a real Irish gangster played by a real Irish actor.
But the differences between the Italian Mafia and the Irish Mob have never been clearer. Still, the themes of controlling your city and pride in your work stay at the forefront of the seminal film, The General.
IN CONCLUSION
THE GENERAL
Accolades: Cannes — 1 Nominations (Palme d’Or), 1 Win (Best Director)
Tomatometer: 82%
JAMAICAN GANGSTER MOVIES LIST
17. The Harder They Come (1972)
The Harder They Come • Trailer
The Harder They Come is perhaps best known for its infectious reggae soundtrack, which holds its own against the best movie songs. But at the heart of the picture, is an important commentary on gangster celebrity. The protagonist Ivan, played by Jimmy Cliff, wants to be a reggae singer but corruption and poverty keep him from success.
Instead, Ivan finds himself enraptured in a life of crime. He becomes infamous for killing police officers. In turn, his former record label releases his song and reaps the profits of his celebrity. Ivan succumbs to a glorified view of the gangster which ultimately forces his downfall.
IN CONCLUSION
THE HARDER THEY COME
Accolades: A cult hit, midnight movie, and a huge step forward for both black cinema and cinema as a whole.
Tomatometer: 91%
JAMES CAGNEY GANGSTER FILMS
16. Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)
Angels with Dirty Faces • Trailer
Billed as “the most devastating blast of drama to hit the screen since Public Enemy,” Angels with Dirty Faces mostly makes true on its assertion. In many ways, this is the spiritual successor to Public Enemy; the chief difference being that Angels With Dirty Faces was produced after the institution the Hays Code and censorship guidelines.
The film condemns the gangster lifestyle even more than before. This is also one of the first gangster films to heavily involve the Catholic faith, which would go on to become a major characteristic of Mafia films.
IN CONCLUSION
ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES
Accolades: Academy Awards — 3 Nominations (Best Actor, Director, and Original Story).
Tomatometer: 100%
GREATEST SCORSESE GANGSTER MOVIES
15. The Departed (2006)
The Departed • Trailer
The Departed is adapted from the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. Infernal Affairs is an excellent movie in its own right and I considered putting it here in place of The Departed. But I came to the conclusion that if one film outranked the other, it was The Departed.
Scorsese paints a sensational portrait of South Boston crime with Jack Nicholson commanding the screen in one of his all-time great performances. In some ways, The Departed is the antithesis of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Whereas the former is loud, explosive, and consequential, the latter is quiet, understated, and contextual.
The Departed is one of the great gangster movies of all-time, it just doesn’t say much beyond its subject matter.
IN CONCLUSION
THE DEPARTED
Accolades: Academy Awards — 1 Nomination (Best Supporting Actor), and 4 Wins (Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Film Editing).
Tomatometer: 91%
COCKNEY GANGSTER FILMS
14. The Long Good Friday (1980)
The Long Good Friday • Trailer
The Long Good Friday is the quintessential British gangster film. Bob Hoskins plays the leader of a British gang that plans to start a partnership with the American Mafia in hopes that he can become a legitimate businessman.
But things start to unravel as conflicts between British, American, and Irish gangs arise. The Long Good Friday is also significant because of its detailed re-creation of Cockney crime.
IN CONCLUSION
THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY
Accolades: BAFTAs — 1 Nominee (Best Actor)
Tomatometer: 96%
LA HOOD GANGSTER FILMS
13. Boyz n the Hood (1991)
"Gentrification" Scene • Boyz n the Hood
John Singleton’s directorial debut Boyz n the Hood is a landmark achievement in film-making. It started a whole sub-movement of art that addressed street life in Los Angeles during this period of rioting and fear. Boyz n the Hood is a cautionary tale about the gangster lifestyle; and how even if you don’t choose it, it might choose you depending on who you are and where you live.
The film is also a warning to the audience about the effects of gentrification and how institutions proliferate crime to keep people down. Many films before Boyz n the Hood explored the idea of community gang life but none put into words its effect like Laurence Fishburne’s Furious Styles did on a Compton street corner.
IN CONCLUSION
BOYZ IN THE HOOD
Accolades: Academy Awards — 2 Nominations (Best Original Screenplay and Director). John Singleton is the youngest, and first African American, director to ever be nominated for the award.
Tomatometer: 96%
PROHIBITION-ERA GANGSTER MOVIES
12. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Miller's Crossing • Trailer
The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing is a phenomenal Prohibition-era crime movie. What does crime do to a man? Does it strip him of his morals and humanity or make him more of who he always was?
These are the questions that Miller’s Crossing explores across a thrilling backdrop of Irish and Italian gangs.
IN CONCLUSION
MILLER'S CROSSING
Accolades: National Board of Review Top 10 Films (1990).
Tomatometer: 91%
ORSON WELLES’ GANGSTER CRIME
11. Touch of Evil (1958)
Touch of Evil • Trailer
Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil is one of the greatest gangster crime movies ever made. The film served as a return to Hollywood for Orson Welles, albeit a brief one at that. The original release of the film was partially re-written and re-shot after Welles was dismissed from the project. Despite the arduous production, Touch of Evil emerged as the seminal gangster film about the corruption of the drug trade on the U.S. — Mexico border.
IN CONCLUSION
TOUCH OF EVIL
Accolades: Entered into the National Board of Film Preservation in 1993.
Tomatometer: 96%
TOP 10 GANGSTER MOVIES
10. The French Connection (1971)
The French Connection • Trailer
Part police thriller, part international gangster drama, The French Connection is one of the most praised films of each genre. Gene Hackman plays New York detective “Popeye” who uncovers a New York City drug trade with a French connection (Ha! How ironic!).
This story is unique within the gangster genre because it’s told from the perspective of the cops, who solve the gang case one clue at a time. Still, I consider The French Connection a gangster movie although it’s told from the other side.
IN CONCLUSION
THE FRENCH CONNECTION
Accolades: Academy Awards — 3 Nominations (Best Supporting Actor, Cinematography, and Sound), and 5 Wins (Best Picture, Lead Actor, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Film Editing).
Tomatometer: 98%
TOP ITALIAN GANGSTER MOVIES
9. Gomorrah (2008)
Gomorrah • Trailer
By the year 2000, world culture had grown to see gangster films as a mostly sensational, idyllic genre. Popular gangster movies were rife with moral praise; often creating heroes and badass anti-heroes out of people the court would sentence to death.
Gomorrah, which is based on a book of the same name about the real Mafia group from Napoli, has no intent of glamorizing gang life. In fact, Gomorrah is an indictment of gangster films that have inspired young people to take up a life of crime.
One film in particular that is condemned in this way is Scarface. Children in the film say they want to be like Tony Montana but the life of crime they find is not the one that they had envisioned from the movies.
IN CONCLUSION
GOMORRAH
Accolades: Cannes — 1 Nomination (Palme d’Or) and 1 Win (Grand Jury Prize).
Tomatometer: 92%
TOP FRENCH GANGSTER FILMS
8. A Prophet (2009)
A Prophet • Trailer
Jacques Audiard directs this thrilling gangster film about a young man who finds himself recruited into the Corsican Mafia while serving a prison sentence. A Prophet is a remarkably modern gangster movie.
At the center of the film is a struggle between Muslim and Corsican French cultures. The protagonist, played Tahar Rahim, is a man that is caught between these cultures. On one side, he has his ancestry. On the other, he has the illusion of a future.
This is a film that has roots in older gangster films like The French Connection and The Godfather.
Similar themes arise but are shown in unique lights.
IN CONCLUSION
A PROPHET
Accolades: Academy Awards — 1 Nomination (Best Foreign Language Film).
Tomatometer: 97%
TOP BRAZILIAN GANGSTER MOVIES
7. City of God (2002)
City of God • Trailer
City of God is a unique gangster film for a few reasons.
It’s told by a narrator.
It uses photography to connect the story.
It’s one of the few prominent Brazilian gangster movies.
We’ve explored gangster movies from the perspective of the criminal, the cop, and the bystander. But what about a gangster movie from the perspective of someone documenting it?
City of God is about the rise and fall of criminal under lords throughout the Cidade de Deus favela in Brazil. It also represents a cast made up primarily of people who lived in that favela. The whole film has a documentary-style feel to it while very much still being a thriller.
IN CONCLUSION
CITY OF GOD
Accolades: Academy Awards — 4 Nominations (Best Director, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing).
Tomatometer: 91%
TOP RUSSIAN GANGSTER MOVIES
6. Eastern Promises (2007)
Eastern Promises • Trailer
Viggo Mortensen’s Russian accent is just one reason to watch Eastern Promises. David Cronenberg directed from a script by Steven Knight.
The story follows a British nurse who becomes entangled in the Russian Mafia after discovering the notebook of a young girl that connected her pregnancy to a prominent mobster. Eastern Promises is the definitive Russian Mob movie and one of Mortensen’s best performances ever.
IN CONCLUSION
EASTERN PROMISES
Accolades: Academy Awards — Nomination (Best Actor).
Tomatometer: 89%
BEST CLASSIC GANGSTER MOVIES
5. The Public Enemy (1931)
The Public Enemy • Trailer
The pre-code era of film from the late 1920s to 1934 produced some of the most interesting Hollywood films ever made. Pre-code exists after the silent era but before the advent of censorship guidelines. Perhaps no film is more iconic of this short time than The Public Enemy.
This was an era of fundamental transition for the American people. The wealth and grandeur that pushed the 1920s through, exhausted itself entirely for the decade to come. The Great Depression was a time of intense strife and complex moral decisions.
The Public Enemy put these issues center stage while telling one of the first large-scope stories of gangsters in cinema history.
IN CONCLUSION
THE PUBLIC ENEMY
Accolades: Academy Awards — 1 Nomination (Best Original Story for John Bright and Kubec Glasmon)
Tomatometer: 100%
GREATEST GANGSTER MOVIES
4. Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Once Upon a Time in America • Trailer
Once Upon a Time in America is one of the craziest films ever made. It was the final film of Sergio Leone’s legendary career and the only film he completed in the last thirteen years of his life.
He originally wanted the film to be split into two three-hour features but the studio told him he had to cut it into one film. Leone cut it down to 269 minutes but the studio was not satisfied with his attempts at shortening it. He conceded to a 229-minute version but the American version was further cut without his permission to 139 minutes.
The result of the cuts was mass confusion amongst audiences. If the confusion wasn’t enough, the film was further censored for explicit content. It wasn’t until 2012 that the restored 255-minute version was made available to the public — which is a shame because it’s such a terrific film.
It’s a decades-spanning story of friendship and loyalty in the mob in New York City. De Niro gives one of the best performances of his career as a conflicted, opium sick, mobster dreamer. Some of the content is extremely heavy and pushes the boundary, even for a gangster film. But when all is said and done, the full cut of Once Upon a Time in America is one of the top five best gangster movies of all-time.
IN CONCLUSION
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA
Accolades: Golden Globes — 2 Nominations (Best Director and Original Score).
Tomatometer: 86%
BEST GANGSTER MOVIES OF ALL-TIME
3. The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather • Trailer
Saying something against The Godfather is like complaining about winning a million-dollar lottery — nobody wants to hear it. Francis Ford Coppola’s undeniable masterpiece is an adaption of Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name. Marlon Brando gives his all-time great performance as Don Vito Corleone, the patriarch of the Corleone crime family.
This is the most iconic gangster film ever made. Every cinema fan knows the image of Don Vito holding the cat, the horse in the bed, or Michael shutting the door on his former life. And for good reason, these are some of the most expressive and emotional moments in film history.
Puzo and Coppola's brilliant screenplay for The Godfather is like a cherry on top and if there’s any argument against the film, it’s that its story wasn’t fully told in the first film.
IN CONCLUSION
THE GODFATHER
Accolades: Academy Awards — 7 Nominations (Best Editing, Sound, Costume Design, Director; Supporting Actor (Pacino, Caan, Duvall), and 3 Wins (Best Lead Actor, Adapted Screenplay, and Picture).
Tomatometer: 98%
FAMOUS GANGSTER FILMS
2. Goodfellas (1990)
Goodfellas • Trailer
Goodfellas is a film that I’ve watched nearly a dozen times and have found a new way to appreciate it every time. Martin Scorsese directed the film based on an adaption of the novel Wiseguy by Nicholas Pillegi.
The film begins with Liotta as the narrator saying “as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” From there, the film takes you on a tour of the Brooklyn Italian crime world, and halfway through it, you’ll probably want to be a gangster too.
There’s sex, drugs, and vice galore — and the wiseguys on-screen seem like they’re having the time of their life. But by the end of the film, Scorsese does away with the glamorized view of gangsters and cripples his protagonist to the one thing every gangster hates — a rat.
IN CONCLUSION
GOODFELLAS
Accolades: Academy Awards — 5 Nominations (Best Film Editing, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, Director, Picture) and 1 Win (Best Supporting Actor).
Tomatometer: 96%
GREATEST GANGSTER MOVIE OF ALL-TIME
1. The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Godfather Part II • Trailer
No shot in film history has sobered me more than that of Pacino’s Michael Corleone, fist over the face, pondering the choices that have led him to this moment. The camera zooms towards him, and all we hear is silence. Michael’s eyes gaze into oblivion.
Then, the unforgettable music swells and the tragedy of both Godfather films wash over you like a monsoon. Perhaps no character demonstrates the phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely” more than Michael Corleone.
Over the course of two films, we see how his gangster ascent correlates directly to his moral descent. Both films are masterclasses, but it’s The Godfather Part II that takes the top spot for its flawless execution of gangster film themes.
IN CONCLUSION
THE GODFATHER PART II
Accolades: Academy Awards — 5 Nominations (Best Actor, Supporting Actor (Gazzo, Strasberg), Supporting Actress, and Costume Design), and 6 Wins (Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Art Direction, and Original Score).
Tomatometer: 97%
Up Next
The Best Mafia Movies
Gangster movies cover a lot of ground, including Mafia movies, but this is our list of Mafia-centric entries only. But in case you're thinking this list is only Italian Mafia, you're dead wrong. Sure, the word Mafia is Italian and there are obviously Italian mob movies on the list but we've got entries from around the world — including the best Irish, Japanese, Russian, British mob movies, and more. Read on or else we'll have to go to the mattresses.
Up Next: Best Mafia Movies →
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5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 47 | https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/24/14698632/get-out-review-jordan-peele | en | Get Out is a horror film about benevolent racism. It's spine-chilling. | [
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"Alissa Wilkinson"
] | 2017-02-24T00:00:00 | Jordan Peele’s directorial debut shares DNA with other classics of horror in the best way possible. | en | /static-assets/icons/favicon.ico | Vox | https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/24/14698632/get-out-review-jordan-peele | The premise of Get Out has been done before: A young black man (Daniel Kaluuya) goes home with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to meet her parents. You can pretty much fill in the blanks from there.
Except, gloriously, you can’t. Get Out — written and directed by Jordan Peele, half of the celebrated comedy duo Key and Peele — makes the incredibly smart move to cast this story about racism not as a drama or comedy, but as a horror film.
Rating
4.5
Racism is scary, of course. But Get Out isn’t about the blatantly, obviously scary kind of racism — burning crosses and lynchings and snarling hate. Instead, it’s interested in showing how racist behavior that tries to be aggressively unscary is just as horrifying, and in making us feel that horror, in a visceral, bodily way. In the tradition of the best social thrillers, Get Out takes a topic that is often approached cerebrally — casual racism — and turns it into something you feel in your tummy. And it does it with a wicked sense of humor.
Get Out is about a black man who stumbles into a very white, very weird world
After dating for about five months, Chris (Kaluuya) and Rose (Williams) are headed upstate to hang out with her aggressively white parents, neurosurgeon Dean (Bradley Whitford) and therapist/hypnotist mother Missy (Catherine Keener). Chris is a little worried about Rose’s family’s reaction to him — she hasn’t told them that her boyfriend is black — but they’re very nice to him, even if Dean’s pointedly enthusiastic comments about the achievements of Olympian Jesse Owens and loving Obama come off as a bit clueless.
The estate is tended by a groundskeeper named Walter (Marcus Henderson) and a housekeeper named Georgina (Betty Gabriel), both of whom are black. Dean apologizes to Chris about the optics of two black servants at a white family’s estate seeming a bit regressive. Rose’s brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) also turns up, to get drunk and tell embarrassing stories about his sister. Things settle into a normal family routine. Everyone’s excited for an upcoming annual party to which all the family friends are invited.
Then things start to get weird. Chris, a habitual smoker, can’t sleep the first night and steps outside to have a cigarette. He sees some odd activity on the premises, and when he comes inside, he has a strange encounter with Missy. When he wakes up the next morning in a cold sweat, things still seem … off. Later, when he tries to call his buddy Rod (Lil Rel Howery), a TSA agent, he discovers his cellphone has been randomly unplugged and now has no power. And at the party, the only other black guy, Logan (Lakeith Stanfield), is acting really weird.
The less you know about where Get Out goes from there, the better. The element of surprise is what makes the movie fun to watch, and the cathartic third act had the audience I saw the film with hollering at the screen and applauding.
Get Out draws on the visceral experience of being objectified or colonized by another consciousness
From the beginning of the film, Peele’s directorial vision is clear: creepy, funny, totally contemporary and aware of what it’s doing. The movie vacillates between shots that belong to comedy — conventional over-the-shoulder shots that let you feel like you’re in on the conversational joke — and shots that belong to horror — empty patches of screen that make you feel like someone could jump out at any moment. It’s a remarkably assured and confident debut from Peele, and perfectly cast.
It’s clear that Peele is drawing on a long tradition of social thrillers and horror films. In fact, he recently curated a series of them at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to coincide with the release of Get Out, and the films he picked are revealing. Among them are Night of the Living Dead, Funny Games, The Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, and the film I couldn’t stop thinking about while watching this one: Rosemary’s Baby.
Most of these films draw on a very particular terror: the feeling of having your personal space or your own body invaded by some other consciousness, usually one with malicious intent. That can take the shape of home invasion (Funny Games), or slowly going nuts (The Shining), or zombification (Night of the Living Dead), or being literally consumed by someone else (The Silence of the Lambs).
Rosemary’s Baby holds a particularly visceral spot in horror film history for women, as it draws on the complicated feeling of having another being in your body during pregnancy, as well as being seen as an object, a body to be remarked upon and talked about. (That’s hardly a phenomenon experienced only by pregnant women, of course.)
The feeling of being turned into an object to be feared, desired, or operated upon is also part of Get Out, though in this case it’s positioned in terms of the black body, particularly the body of a black man. Nice white people talk to him and about him in ways that make it clear he’s not like them — whether it’s about his “frame” and “genetic makeup” or about black skin “being in fashion” or asking Rose if it’s true that “it” is better. (We know what that person means, and so do Rose and Chris.)
Chris endures it all with a smile that seems born of years of having to put up with this kind of thing, and we’re allowed in on the joke. These clueless white people are trying to be cool in front of Chris, whom they just sort of think must be cool because he’s black, and he’s indulged it. He wears the same expression when he and Rose talk to a cop after they accidentally hit a deer on their way up north, and the policeman who responds to their call insists on seeing Chris’s ID — something Rose soundly rebuffs in words that would get Chris hauled away in the back of the cop car (though her act takes on a different meaning later in the movie).
Get Out is a movie about double consciousness, and it pulls off its goal with skill
In the film’s final act, the racism subtext becomes text in a big way, which reveals what Get Out was after all along. The film taps into the phenomenon of double consciousness, which W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about in an essay that appeared in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.
In the essay, Du Bois identified the feeling of having an identity that’s been splintered into several parts — of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tale of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” He continues:
One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.
Since Du Bois, the idea has been adapted by women, especially black feminists writing about living in patriarchal societies. Chris’s experience embodies a 2017 version of Du Bois’s, both in how he experiences his two-ness among the folks upstate and how he relates to Walter and Georgina.
(The film itself seems a bit doubly conscious, though in a different way; it both embodies and winks at some of the tropes common to horror films, which obviously signal that everything isn’t going to be hunky-dory at Rose’s parents’ house. After all, it’s titled Get Out. You kind of know what’s coming.)
The experience of being observed matters here, and the manner in which one is observed and becomes the object of desire — a sort of fetish object — is at the center of Get Out, even though it doesn’t call attention to the idea specifically.
The deft way this is handled in the script — and the multiple ways the theme is layered into the film, including several repeated visual symbols and motifs — makes Get Out a great candidate to join the classics of social horror, since it’s unusual to see any movie pull off this approach with respect to the topic of race.
I’m white, and have no idea what it’s like to be a black American, and I never really can understand it instinctively, no matter how much I try to empathize. But my female body thrilled sickeningly with recognition when I saw Rosemary’s Baby, and I felt an echo of that same sensation watching Get Out. Which makes me wonder if — just maybe — a great, funny, well-made horror movie like Get Out can, while not totally bridging the gap between my experience and someone else’s, at least help us understand each other a little better.
Get Out opens in theaters on February 24. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 12 | https://www.wikihow.com/Be-an-Attractive-Girl | en | 3 Ways to Be an Attractive Girl | [
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"Paul Julch, MA"
] | 2014-12-21T00:00:00 | Ever wish people, or at least your crush, would notice you? Well here you'll learn how to dress yourself like a princess and be like one too. Style forever! Have good hygiene. Cleanliness matters. Shower and wash your face every day for a... | en | wikiHow | https://www.wikihow.com/Be-an-Attractive-Girl | Article SummaryX
Being attractive starts with focusing on your health and confidence. One way to stay fit and healthy is to get involved in sports or dance. Another way to feel healthy is to eat right, so make sure at least 1/3 of each meal you eat is fruit or vegetables. You'll look better when you are rested, so try to get at least 8 or 9 hours of sleep every night. When you are at school, act confident by keeping your back straight and your head held high and eventually, you will start to feel more confident too. For some tips on how to dress so that you feel attractive, keep reading! | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 3 | https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/50-best-female-characters-entertainment-industry-survey-results-951483/ | en | Hollywood’s 50 Favorite Female Characters | [
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"THR Staff"
] | 2016-12-09T06:00:00+00:00 | The Hollywood Reporter's survey shows how Olivia Pope to Annie Hall become possible when the industry writes great female characters. | en | The Hollywood Reporter | https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/50-best-female-characters-entertainment-industry-survey-results-951483/ | Whatever else one can say about gender equality in Hollywood, there's clearly no shortage of female roles for space princesses, alien hunters and flying nannies.
For THR's latest intra-industry poll, the editors asked Hollywood professionals — actors, writers, directors and others — to take an online survey of their favorite fictional female characters. More than 1,800 participated — twice as many women as men — but the results proved there isn't such a great divide between the sexes after all, at least when it comes to what types of females we enjoy watching on screens. By comfortable majorities, both genders picked a certain Hogwarts know-it-all as their No. 1.
Naturally, the poll was anonymous, but some industry pros don't mind sharing. "The tough Angelina Jolie characters in Wanted and Salt — and whoever Ava Gardner played in capri pants," offers Dawn Hudson, CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Hunger Games franchise producer Nina Jacobson confesses to having a "soft spot for Katniss Everdeen," while Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy admits that as a child she worshiped Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. "I used to think I was her," she says.
Chances are, there's at least one character on these pages who you once imagined being, particularly if you're female — and maybe even if you're not. After all, who hasn't dreamt of bitch-slapping an alien, owning a pet dragon or even traveling by umbrella?
Click here to vote for your favorite female character of all time in THR's bracket.
Edited by Benjamin Svetkey and Andy Lewis. Reported by Rebecca Ford, Mia Galuppo, Borys Kit, Ashley Lee, Kendal McAlpin, Brian Porreca and Bryn Elise Sandberg. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 2 | https://ew.com/gallery/femme-fatales-movies-tv/ | en | 30 of the greatest femme fatales | [
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] | 2016-04-04T12:45:19-04:00 | EW lists the best femme fatales in film and TV history who will haunt your dreams, for better and for worse. | en | /favicon.ico | EW.com | https://ew.com/gallery/femme-fatales-movies-tv/ | You can't take your eyes off them — and you'd better not turn your back on them, either. Femme fatales have been compelling moviegoers since the silent era of cinema, and have taken many different shapes over the years. From classics like Barbara Stanwyck's murderous Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity to Sharon Stone's playful and dangerous Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct during the '90s erotic thriller boom to Robin Wright's power-hungry politician on Netflix's House of Cards, there's nothing quite like a devious dame.
Check out our list of femme fatales that continue to haunt our dreams, ahead.
01 of 30
Catherine Tramell — Basic Instinct (1992)
A stereotypical male fantasy transformed into a nightmare: a bisexual nymphomaniac who might sleep with or kill you, played by Sharon Stone.
02 of 30
Suzanne Stone Maretto — To Die For (1995)
Blind ambition meets blonde ambition. Suzanne (Nicole Kidman) wants fame at any cost — and she's just delusional enough to get it.
03 of 30
Claire Underwood — House of Cards (2013–2018)
Behind every great man, there's a great woman (Robin Wright). And behind every Machiavellian power-monger politician, there's a partner just as nefarious. (With better hair, too.)
04 of 30
Bridget Gregory — The Last Seduction (1994)
Beware of a woman in trouble. Manipulative and brilliant, Bridget (Linda Fiorentino) is a big New York City fish in a small-town pond.
05 of 30
Jane Smith — Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)
An assassin (Angelina Jolie) hunting her assassin husband (Brad Pitt), who never stood a chance.
06 of 30
Nikita — La Femme Nikita (1997–2001)
A wrongfully accused innocent forced into a world of double-crossing agents and crisscrossing alliances. Nikita's (Peta Wilson) a tough trained superspy — and her greatest endurance challenge is how she holds onto her soul.
07 of 30
Meredith Johnson — Disclosure (1994)
A lady boss who sexually harasses straight white men, Meredith (Demi Moore) is a post-feminist cartoon, but Moore makes her an enthralling antagonist.
08 of 30
Amy Dunne — Gone Girl (2014)
What happens when the perfect metropolitan New Yorker cool-girl goes domestic? Spoiler: You wouldn't like her when she's angry. Played by Rosamund Pike.
09 of 30
Selina Kyle — Batman Returns (1992)
Witness the healing powers of the psychotic break, as a shy lonely assistant (Michelle Pfeiffer) gets reborn into a proud, unafraid, wild creature of the night.
10 of 30
Selina Kyle — The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
The Catwoman legend reimagined for the Recessionary era. Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle is an amoral streetwise antihero searching for a new beginning — by any means necessary.
11 of 30
Mystique — the X-Men movies (2000–2019)
Covered in blue body paint, speaking only the bare minimum of dialogue, the model-turned-actress (Rebecca Romijn) gave the shape-changing mutant balletic grace. She's Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name with fewer clothes and fewer names.
12 of 30
Sil — Species (1995)
Sil (Natasha Henstridge) positively demands going all the way on the first date. in this case, "all the way" means "give birth immediately to an alien-human-hybrid monster."
13 of 30
Lara Croft — the Lara Croft movies (2001–2003)
Indiana Jones in skintight short shorts. Only Jolie could bring the bodacious videogame adventurer to life.
14 of 30
Gemma Teller Morrow — Sons of Anarchy (2008–2014)
Lady Macbeth was a no-talent rookie compared to Queen Gemma (Katey Sagal). She'll do anything for her family — and anything to her family.
15 of 30
Ginger Knowles — Swordfish (2001)
The perfect vehicle for Halle Berry's sultry-sweet charisma, Ginger's less femme fatale than femme mystérieuse. That smirk could be deadly.
16 of 30
Lucinda Harris — Derailed (2005)
Successful, married, beautiful — and bored. Lucinda (Jennifer Aniston) is a tantalizing siren for a man looking for excitement.
17 of 30
Kathryn Merteuil — Cruel Intentions (1999)
Before Mean Girls, she was the meanest girl. Sarah Michelle Gellar's prep-school puppet master is villainous on a Biblical level. Literally: She keeps cocaine in her crucifix!
18 of 30
Cersei Lannister — Game of Thrones (2011–2019)
Men are such boys. Westeros needs a good, firm hand. Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) is a Queen.
19 of 30
Xenia Onatopp — GoldenEye (1995)
A Soviet agent (Famke Janssen) running rampant through the post-Cold War superspy private sector. James Bond's met so many women, but how many of them literally have killer thighs?
20 of 30
Samantha Caine/Charly Baltimore — The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
An amnesiac small-town schoolteacher (Geena Davis) finds out she's got a mysterious espionage past. She's Jason Bourne for desperate housewives.
21 of 30
The Bride — the Kill Bill movies (2003–2004)
Left for dead on her wedding day — shot by her unborn baby's dad! — the blood-splattered Bride (Uma Thurman) awakes seeking vengeance. Just your average cowboy samurai assassin.
22 of 30
Sarah Walker — Chuck (2007–2012)
Every nerd's dream: a badass secret agent (Yvonne Strahovski) with a heart of gold. The central joke of Chuck is that the title should actually be Sarah.
23 of 30
Lynn Bracken — L.A. Confidential (1997)
A sex worker cut to look like Veronica Lake, Lynn (Kim Basinger) is the femme fatale gone meta: an alluring Hollywood dreamgirl who dreams of a regular, old-fashioned private life.
24 of 30
Saffron — Firefly (2002)
An oft-married con woman with the power to seduce the whole solar system. A defining role for pre-Mad Men Christina Hendricks, who plays Saffron like a chameleon. She's whatever you want — and you'll do whatever she desires.
25 of 30
Aeon Flux — Aeon Flux (2005)
Because every totalitarian postapocalyptic dystopia needs at least one gun-totin', jump-kickin', rebel acrobat (Charlize Theron).
26 of 30
Phyllis Dietrichson — Double Indemnity (1944)
One of the most iconic femme fatales in film history, Phyllis (played with cool perfection by Barbara Stanwyck) persuades an insurance agent to murder her husband for the life insurance — and tries her damndest to get away with it.
27 of 30
Ellen Berent Harland — Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) is another classic femme fatale whose obsessive love for her new husband leads to murderous consequences for anyone who gets in the way.
28 of 30
Lorraine Broughton — Atomic Blonde (2017)
Charlize Theron portrays an icy cool spy with a lethal touch as she hunts down a list of double agents in this sleek action thriller.
29 of 30
Dorothy Vallens — Blue Velvet (1986)
Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) exists in an abusive environment in this violent film noir, but don't be fooled — she also has a kind of agency as she draws naive Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) into her web.
30 of 30
Cassie Thomas — Promising Young Woman (2020)
Carey Mulligan plays a woman out for revenge against the people she deems responsible for her best friend's suicide in this incendiary thriller. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 11 | 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 | 1 | 9 | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/movies/older-actresses-comedies.html | en | Know What’s Funny About Getting Old? These Movies Do. | [
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] | null | [
"Esther Zuckerman",
"www.nytimes.com",
"esther-zuckerman"
] | 2024-07-28T00:00:00 | Star-studded with leading ladies, who are all a bit older, recent comedies like “The Fabulous Four” and “80 for Brady” are establishing a popular new genre. | en | /vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/movies/older-actresses-comedies.html | There are two new films this year in which Academy Award-nominated actresses in their 70s whip out tiny sex toys. In “Summer Camp,” Kathy Bates offers up wee vibrators to Alfre Woodard and Diane Keaton. In “The Fabulous Four,” it’s Bette Midler giving Susan Sarandon a kegel ball that she later flings at a bike thief.
You might confuse these comedies with “Book Club” (2018), where Keaton, again, finds herself in the company of fellow older luminaries (Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen). Or with “Poms” (2019), which places Keaton on a retirement community cheer squad with Jacki Weaver, Rhea Perlman and Pam Grier. Then, again, there’s also “80 for Brady” (2023), where Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sally Field and Rita Moreno go to the Super Bowl.
Though the circumstances are different, the similarities in plot, casting and themes make the films easy to classify but tough to label. “Legendary ladies of cinema do a light romp,” is a little long; “Old lady comedies” might seem demeaning, but that is, essentially, how the films identify themselves. In the “80 for Brady” trailer, Moreno sums it up by saying: “The Super Bowl is no place for four old women.”
Regardless of the label, this growing genre of star-studded comedies has become popular in recent years, with “Four,” which hit theaters on Friday, becoming the latest installment in the canon.
You can usually see the same types of characters in each film. At least one of the women is a stick in the mud. In “The Fabulous Four” that’s Sarandon’s job. As Lou, she’s a serious doctor who loves cats and is holding a grudge against Midler’s character over a long-ago offense. Often Keaton, with her turtlenecks, is the most uptight of her group. And Fonda, when she appears, plays sexually adventurous characters, prone to making off-color jokes. Megan Mullally has that gig in “Four,” with an assist from the famously bawdy Midler. There are usually high jinks involving behavior that one might not expect from seniors. They get high. They go on adventurous excursions like parasailing or ziplining. They experiment with technology and social media. (“The Fabulous Four” has a whole bit about Midler on TikTok.)
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
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5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 46 | https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/it-ends-with-us-movie-review-blake-lively-colleen-hoover-justin-baldoni-1235033131/ | en | ‘It Ends with Us’ Review: Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s Solid Colleen Hoover Drama Tackles Tricky Subject Matter | [
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"Proma Khosla"
] | 2024-08-07T14:00:00+00:00 | Blake Lively and director Justin Baldoni star in the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's novel "It Ends with Us," with a script by Christy Hall. | en | IndieWire | https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/it-ends-with-us-movie-review-blake-lively-colleen-hoover-justin-baldoni-1235033131/ | Sometimes, you go into a movie knowing its entire plot already. Justin Baldoni’s “It Ends with Us” certainly isn’t trying to conceal the story laid bare in the film’s trailer — all of it based on the 2016 bestseller by Colleen Hoover that was a smash amongst the BookTok faithful — leading to some delicate choices to keep things moving and interesting over the course of more than two hours of running time. Armed with a script by “Daddio” filmmaker Christy Hall, “It Ends with Us” manages to sensitively handle its delicate subject matter, though largely at the cost of a more intricate narrative.
The film begins with Lily Bloom (Blake Lively), a New England florist who connects instantly with neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni, pulling double duty as star and director). Their first interaction on a Boston rooftop is almost a meet-cute — except that Lily’s dad died just a few days prior, and Ryle’s carrying his own grief and enough emotional anguish to kick over a chair. But their love story blossoms (sorry), first with flirtation and sexual tension right out of a full-on romance movie, and then into something more sinister, which parallels the domestic abuse Lily witnessed in her parents.
There’s no elegant way to delve in to Lily’s childhood, so it ends up shoehorned into a series of flashbacks, intercut between the main story like an episode of “Lost.” But through it all, there is high school sweetheart Atlas (played as a teen by Alex Neustaedter, opposite Isabela Ferrer as young Lily), a rare source of light in Lily’s young life, whose resurgence in the present immediately her reeling — and enrages Ryle.
Beneath the surface of this disconcertingly handsome man with a stable job (literally a brain surgeon) is something too familiar to Lily, to her mother, and to Atlas, whose mother was abused by various partners and who clocks Lily’s situation from a mile away. Baldoni makes the conscious choice to put viewers squarely in Lily’s POV; initially the abuse looks like it could be accidental, with camera angles and editing left strategically ambiguous to mirror her lived experience. The audience doesn’t get to confirm these acts for what they are until Lily herself does, a smart creative decision even if it dulls the pacing well into act two.
Lively is the consummate romantic heroine, all smiles and laughter and quirky job and bizarre outfits and artfully messy hair — arguably to a fault, because there’s not much to Lily’s personality beyond the aforementioned bullet points (and extravagant shoes out of Lively’s own closet). Baldoni channels every ounce of his lethal charisma into Ryle’s first act romantic avatar, careful not to lead with the character’s inner darkness — but once it’s revealed, he wears it on his sleeve.
After focusing on producing and directing since “Jane the Virgin” concluded in 2019, he slides back into the romantic lead mold with ease. “It Ends with Us” is a surprisingly apt vehicle for Baldoni’s particular multi-hyphenate toolkit, and an extension of the actor’s longtime mission to encourage men and boys to unpack conventional masculinity and embrace new role models.
The cast is rounded out by a conspicuously strong Jenny Slate as Ryle’s sister and Lily’s best friend, and Hasan Minhaj as her husband (ostensibly playing a heightened screen version of himself so tonally jarring that he’s completely absent from the final act). Amy Morton barely cracks two dimensions with how Lily’s mom is written, and while Brandon Sklenar makes an intriguing foil to Baldoni’s fantasy-level ideal as the adult Atlas, he’s similarly underdeveloped and utilized (but Hoover’s novel has a sequel).
Still, “It Ends with Us” does what it wants to (and what made Hoover’s book such a smash hit), highlighting the patterns of abuse, trauma, and silence at play in this specific story. Baldoni and Hall handle Lily and everyone around her with empathy, downplaying unpleasantness or oversimplifying story elements ultimately to mitigate risk and protect viewers — with the opportunity to dig deeper in a potential sequel.
And while some viewers may brace while watching (or avoid altogether), the overwhelming feeling of watching this adaptation in a packed theater was solidarity and catharsis. As dark as the dirt is in this story, “It Ends with Us” is a film focused on what can grow out of it.
Grade: C+
Sony will release “It Ends with Us” in theaters on Friday, August 9. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 50 | https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/what-is-a-woman-stream-matt-walsh-movie-daily-wire-rcna91359 | en | 'What is a Woman?': 3 say they were tricked into participating | [
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"David Ingram"
] | 2023-07-26T21:03:08+00:00 | 3 people who appeared in a documentary that criticizes the transgender community said they were tricked into being interviewed for “What Is a Woman?” | en | https://nodeassets.nbcnews.com/cdnassets/projects/ramen/favicon/nbcnews/all-other-sizes-PNG.ico/favicon.ico | NBC News | https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/what-is-a-woman-stream-matt-walsh-movie-daily-wire-rcna91359 | Three people who appeared in a viral documentary that criticizes the transgender community said they were tricked into being interviewed for the movie, titled “What Is a Woman?”
The filmmakers’ alleged sleight-of-hand tactics contradict the movie’s promise to be a “fearless” examination of the modern gender debate, and the tactics appear to show the lengths to which some conservative activists have gone to try to cast doubt on the rights of trans people.
The video debuted in June 2022 to little fanfare but received wide attention on Twitter last month with the help of tech billionaire and Twitter owner Elon Musk, who reversed the platform’s previous restrictions on the movie and allowed it to be uploaded and shared on the platform. He then promoted it on his own account, writing, “Every parent should watch this.” Twitter’s previous management had a rule against degrading behavior or other hateful content.
The movie has since marked more than 187 million views on Twitter alone and been endlessly memed and recycled among conservatives, making it another major flashpoint in a nationwide conflict over transgender rights that’s also playing out in state legislatures, public libraries and courthouses.
But three people who participated in the film’s production by sitting for interviews told NBC News that its producers misrepresented how it would portray transgender topics and that they were unwittingly inserted into “gotcha” moments with right-wing provocateur Matt Walsh, who narrated and starred in the film. Two of the three people provided copies of emails in which a producer, Rebecca Dobkowitz, used flattering language and wrote that the documentary would bring to light the challenges facing trans people.
“What Is a Woman?” ended up very different from that pitch.
It includes repeated attacks on trans people, with Walsh at one point calling them part of an “insane ideological cult,” even as the 95-minute movie employs some methods of documentary filmmaking such as formal interviews.
Few who watched the movie likely knew about the tactics used to make it.
With its popularity online, the film has spread myths about sexuality and gender, including the debunked rumor that some children are identifying as cats and using litter boxes at school.
Dobkowitz did not respond to requests for comment via email, text and voicemail. Walsh did not respond to requests for comment sent to the conservative website The Daily Wire, which backed the film and where he has a podcast and column.
Walsh said in January 2022, while the movie was in production, that he had a plan for “waging an all out assault on gender ideology.”
“People see that gender ideology is toxic and insane. We have the numbers to fight back and destroy it. All we need is the will to do what’s necessary,” he said on Twitter.
Dr. Marci Bowers, a California surgeon whose patients include trans women, said she first heard from Dobkowitz in July 2021. The producer emailed her with what seemed like a friendly request for a documentary about transgender people and the “challenges they face in today’s culture,” according to a copy of the email that she provided to NBC News.
“Since you are a leading expert and professional in this field, we would love to interview and hear your insights,” Dobkowitz wrote.
Bowers said she felt Dobkowitz was hiding her intentions with the “completely deceptive” email.
“I didn’t really know about Matt’s conservative credentials,” she said of Walsh. “They sugarcoated it just a little bit. They didn’t give me an indication of what it would really be about, but they did give me the title of the video.”
The movie includes footage of an interview with Bowers and with two other people, who told NBC News that they felt they were deceived: Dr. Michelle Forcier, a Brown University professor, and Naia Ōkami, a trans woman who lives in Washington state. In the movie, Forcier talks about the process children go through in learning about gender, and Ōkami talks about a different subject entirely — her affinity for wolves — as Walsh tries to make a link between animals and trans people.
While documentary filmmakers such as Michael Moore often use edgy tactics to advance a specific point of view, the use of deception to obtain an interview is generally frowned upon, especially when the subject is a person vulnerable to harassment, according to a 2009 report from American University based on interviews with 45 professional filmmakers and producers.
But in recent years, subterfuge has been popularized by right-wing figures such as James O’Keefe, who founded the hidden-camera outfit Project Veritas.
The tactics that Walsh’s team allegedly employed were already somewhat known within the trans community when the movie was in production. In February 2022, Eli Erlick, a trans rights advocate, published a Twitter thread alleging that Walsh’s team had reached out to her for an interview using a fake name and a front organization called the Gender Unity Project.
At the time, Walsh did not respond to media inquiries about his methods, including from BuzzFeed News and Insider.
The tactics now seem to be spreading. Erlick said that a second right-wing figure, Robby Starbuck, recently tried to recruit her under false pretenses for another documentary-style video called “It Takes a Village.” She posted emails to Twitter.
“The style of Matt’s film is going to be replicated,” Erlick said in a phone interview. “I think they’re using it as a model for a new form of far-right disinformation masquerading as a documentary.”
Starbuck did not respond to emailed requests for comment. He told Rolling Stone in an email last month that trans rights activists were misrepresenting the subject of the documentary he is working on. He told the magazine that his documentary will not involve any “unethical editing,” that no one “of either political side has been upset about their interview,” and that he is taking a “fair and honorable approach to each individual.”
By the time Erlick revealed Walsh’s tactics last year, Bowers, Forcier and Ōkami had already been interviewed by Walsh.
When Ōkami heard from Walsh’s staff in September 2021, she was already experienced in media appearances, so she pressed Dobkowitz for more information on the project.
Dobkowitz wrote back using the same email account she used to contact Bowers. “This documentary will explore the challenges the transgender and LGBTQIA+ face in today’s culture, as well as advancements in transgender care and gender/sex affirmation surgery,” she wrote.
“We are coming from the position that as more attention is given to the transgender community, it’s critical that accurate information is available to the public,” she went on.
In the movie, Walsh did not use phrases such as “transgender care” and “affirmation surgery” — terms that support trans rights — and instead referred to some such treatments as “chemical castration.”
Ōkami said she would not have done the interview if Walsh’s staff had been forthcoming with their perspective. In the movie, Walsh mocks Ōkami for her spiritual and psychological connection with wolves, something that is not connected to her being transgender. Opponents of trans rights often raise the alarmist and false idea that transgender identity is somehow encouraging people to identify as animals.
“It was complete fraud in my opinion,” Ōkami said. “He wanted to use me to make us look ridiculous, to make us look sensational.” She said she spoke with an attorney about potential recourse but was told there was little she could do because she had signed a general release form provided by Walsh’s staff.
Forcier, a professor of pediatrics at Brown University, said she got an email from Walsh’s staff that she thought was a sincere inquiry about the science of puberty blockers.
“I said, ‘sure.’ Learning about blockers is really important, and I’m always trying to be available to talk about the science and help people understand,” she said. For everyone, she said, “I think there’s room for growth, in terms of both individual and larger cultural understanding.”
Forcier said she felt pressured to sign a release form before she knew much more.
“They said they needed the release before they made the effort to come down from Canada,” she said. “There were definitely some pressure tactics: Sign this so we can use the footage.” She said she hasn’t been able to find copies of the emails.
The interview — part of which Walsh later posted online — didn’t last long, Forcier said. A few minutes in, Walsh compared gender dysphoria to believing in Santa Claus and compared puberty blockers to “chemical castration.” Forcier ended the interview.
“I thought, ‘This is not what I thought this was going to be,’” she said. “I thought, ‘This is now a gotcha video, and I was not quite informed about what’s going to be happening today.’”
“He was getting frustrated because I just wouldn’t say some of the things he wanted me to say,” she added. Forcier said she tried to get in touch with Walsh’s staff afterward to learn more and to ask to see the video. She said they didn’t respond.
Doctors who provide transgender care and their allies have been the targets of misinformation campaigns organized on social media for some time, and the promotion of the video whipped up even more of a cultural maelstrom and harassment of the people interviewed for it.
Forcier said she keeps a folder of the worst emails she gets in case she needs to send them to law enforcement later.
“People send really graphic, sexual, violent comments about me being a pediatric gender-care provider. It’s way more graphic and sexual than any work I’ve done,” she said. She shared excerpts with NBC News, including one email saying, “I’m sure Lucifer has a nice warm seat waiting for you.”
Bowers said that one person tracked down her daughter on Instagram and told the daughter she was going to hell. She said that she and her daughter try to take the harassment in stride and even joked about it on Mother’s Day.
“I’d been at the front line for a long time, so I’m used to taking a lot of arrows, but we take those arrows and we send them back with kindness and truth,” she said. Bowers is serving a two-year term as president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the medical group that writes the standards of care for trans health care.
Bowers said that she doesn’t necessarily regret speaking to Walsh. She said her inclination is to talk to anyone and try to find common ground. But she said Walsh in the video came across to her as smug and arrogant.
“He edited it in a way that wasn’t fair, so it doesn’t leave people with any sort of knowledge or education. It just heightens their fears of trans people — to his and his viewers’ loss,” she said.
“Matt really is just a bully,” she said.
Bowers said that she’s undeterred. Her clinic near San Francisco offers surgery not only for transgender people, but also to victims of genital mutilation and other people needing gynecological services.
“I’m here helping people in three areas of medicine that are not covered by current services, so I’m pretty certain that I’m doing God’s work. What is Matt Walsh doing but trying to return us to some 1950s simplified version of male and female?” she said.
Forcier said that, like Bowers, she hasn’t let up in her medical work and that, if anything, she now has more resolve.
“These are adults bullying and victimizing children,” she said about Walsh and his supporters. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 30 | https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/coming-of-age-films/ | en | Coming-of-Age Films: Is the Genre In Decline? | [
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] | 2022-09-01T15:22:24+00:00 | Take a look at the history of coming-of-age films, the years that defined the genre, and the best coming-of-age films anyone can relate to. | en | The Beat: A Blog by PremiumBeat | https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/coming-of-age-films/ | Let’s look at the history of coming-of-age films, the years that defined the genre, and the best coming-of-age films anyone can relate to.
A genre defined by the loss of childhood innocence. Coming-of-age stories look back, often with kinder eyes, on time that felt like the most challenging years of a person’s life.
What Are Coming of Age Films?
The coming-of-age genre is a type of movie focused on a child or teenager’s transition from childhood to young adulthood. Typically a protagonist faces a new challenge in which they begin to lose their childhood innocence.
This can be in the form of falling in love, personal growth, coming to terms with sexuality, death, mature thinking, or developing an adult awareness of violence, drugs, or alcohol. Coming-of-age films often blend drama and comedy, pulling from all aspects of life to tell a true and authentic story.
Some of the earliest and most famous coming-of-age films were adaptations of popular coming-of-age literature. Some of the most well-known are Little Women (1933) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). While some coming-of-age films are a product of the time of their release, like Boyz n the Hood, Juno, Clueless, or The Breakfast Club, many of these movies are period pieces looking back to significant cultural times in a writer or director’s life like The Sandlot, Stand By Me, Dazed and Confused, and American Graffiti.
What was the Golden Era of Coming-of-Age Films?
There were plenty of coming-of-age films throughout the early years of cinema, including longtime classics like Wild Boys of the Road (33), Anne of Green Gables (34), Heidi (37), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (45), The Secret Garden (49), Rebel Without a Cause (55), Old Yeller (57), West Side Story (61), and The Graduate (67).
But it was the films of the 1970s and 80s that really defined coming-of-age films as a genre of its own, many of which are still being copied and inspiring the movies of today.
The 70s saw the release of films like The Last Picture Show (71), Summer of ’42 (71), and Next Stop, Greenwich Village (76). Each heavily focused on various coming-of-age tales, like sexual awakenings or coming to terms with the slowly dying towns they live in.
But perhaps the most famous coming-of-age film of the ’70s, and arguably one of the best coming-to-age films ever made, was American Graffiti (73).
A few years before George Lucas took viewers to a galaxy far away, the director, then in his late 20s, looked back fondly on his teenage years cruising and racing through the streets of California. It was a near-death experience that changed Lucas’s life when he crashed his car shortly after his high school graduation.
Those years cruising, and the accident itself, inspired Lucas to write and direct American Graffiti. The film starred teenage Ron Howard, who was still widely known to audiences as the child Opie from The Andy Griffith Show.
The film was a literal showcase of a coming-to-age moment where audiences familiar with the actor as a child watched him prepare to enter the adult stage of his life and battling with the thoughts of leaving his youthful innocence behind. The film also starred up-and-coming actors Richard Dreyfuss, Cindy Williams, and Harrison Ford.
Perhaps as famous as the story and cast, American Graffiti‘s soundtrack is a seminal masterpiece, a collection of many of the biggest songs of a generation. It was one of the earliest films that truly leveraged rock and roll and chart-topping hits and integrated them into the film as the soundtrack.
What set this film apart and influenced the coming-of-age films was the ensemble cast, each dealing with their insecurities of graduating high school and navigating their entry into adulthood. It made everything feel real.
You can directly trace American Graffiti and its use of popular music hits as a significant influence decades down the line on films like Dazed and Confused (93), Swingers (96), Almost Famous (00), Remember the Titans (00), and even shows like Stranger Things (16).
It was this recipe that really caught on and caused a boom of teenage-focused films in the 1980s. The 80s defined pop culture and, to this day, are still most recognized for coming-of-age films that dominated theaters and later VHS rental stores.
The coming-of-age films of the 1980s are usually remembered as straight comedies, but the decade was full of films dealing with very heavy and difficult topics.
Death was a major influence on films like Stand By Me (86), River’s Edge (86), Tex (82), Empire of the Sun (87), Heathers (88), and Dead Poets Society (89). Yet the decade is mainly remembered for films like The Karate Kid (84), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (82), and Say Anything… (89), as well as the films of John Hughes.
Perhaps the greatest influence on the coming-of-age genre came from writer/director John Hughes, who could balance heavy topics with comedic flare and authenticity.
The John Hughes Coming-of-Age Films
You can dedicate entire novels and documentaries to the work of John Hughes, who not only truly captured legendary coming-of-age stories, but did so in a way that was authentically hilarious and with blockbuster success.
Hughes had a background in writing and advertising, eventually ending up writing at National Lampoon. The rights to his short story Vacation ’58 were purchased by Warner Bros., whose National Lampoon’s Vacation was directed by Harold Ramis.
Not satisfied with his lack of control over the final film, Hughes sought to direct his own stories. With his expertise in fast-paced writing environments, Hughes churned out scripts in the 80s and 90s, including several original stories and sequels to many of his massive hits.
Hughes was behind many massive franchises that he did not direct, like Home Alone, the Vacation sequels, and the Beethoven films. While those franchise films are all genuinely enjoyed and still seeing sequels and remakes to this day, it was Hughes’s coming-of-age films he directed that truly cemented his legacy as one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation.
Before National Lampoon’s Vacation (83) even hit screens, Hughes was allegedly already sitting on 15 screenplays, many of which were written at breakneck speed. According to actress Molly Ringwald, Hughes had pinned her headshot to a bulletin board in his office and, over one weekend, had finished the script for Sixteen Candles.
That 1984 film would be his directorial debut, followed the next year by the legendary coming-of-age ensemble piece The Breakfast Club, and sci-fi coming-of-age Weird Science. The year after that, 1986, saw the release of the Hughes-directed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Hughes-written Pretty in Pink.
Nearly every one of those films can be described as a genre-defining coming-of-age film, with The Breakfast Club often topping lists as one of best films in the genre. That film in particular, more so than Hughes’s other coming-of-age films, has the luxury of an incredible ensemble cast that nearly every person can relate too.
Whether it be athletes, art students, nerds, or troublemakers, The Breakfast Club truly bands a group of misfits together for one day. As the tagline of the film itself states, “They only met once, but it changed their lives forever.”
Hughes coming-of-age films always had a real-world scope, focusing entirely on a small scope of characters and the real-world problems they each faced. That, married to the musical hits of the era made a recipe for success in theaters, but nearly all of his films still feel as relevant to teenagers of this day and age.
Influenced by the Golden Era
The styles and music have changed, but modern coming-of-age films like Booksmart (19), mid90s (18), and even blockbusters like Spider-Man: Homecoming (17)all have nods to John Hughes’ work. He truly captured the essence of the coming-of-age genre.
Fun fact for the day, Jonah Hill, who starred in the beloved coming-of-age comedy Superbad (07), went on to direct the coming-of-age feature mid90s after being inspired by working with Martin Scorcese on Wolf of Wall Street.
Hill’s sister, Beanie Feldstein, has since come into her own, starring in both coming-of-age films Booksmart and Lady Bird (17). Booksmart is often compared to Superbad as a spiritual sequel from a female perspective.
And as mentioned before, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, Boyhood (14), and Everybody Wants Some! (16) take musical and coming-of-age influences from the likes of American Graffiti, as does Paul Thomas Anderson in his films like Boogie Nights (97) and Licorice Pizza (21).
Are Coming-of-Age Films on The Decline?
This is a tough question to answer. If we are talking about mid-tier to large-budget theatrical releases, then absolutely yes, coming-of-age films are not only on the decline, they are almost non-existent. Most coming-of-age films can loosely be classified as comedies, and comedy films, in general, are not being produced on a large scale because of the inability of humor to translate worldwide.
Internationally we’ve seen success with films like Fish Tank (09) and The Hand of God (21). Studios like A24 have found success in the space making smaller budget, artistic-driven coming-of-age films like Moonlight (16), Eighth Grade (18), The Florida Project (17), American Honey (16), and Lady Bird.
Many of these films earning Oscar nominations, including Moonlight’s infamous Best Picture win. Other films like Into the Wild (07), Call Me By Your Name (17) and Licorice Pizza (21) can still manage to find small theatrical release windows thanks to their director’s passion for filmmaking and theatrical release.
But there is still another massive shift that changed everything. Streaming.
Coming-of-age stories have found their new life among today’s youth online. Where in my generation turned to cable television for teen-focused content, today, Netflix and other streaming sites have a collection of series and films targeting young adults that have found massive success.
The downside is streamers tend to greenlight series over films, so most coming-of-age series online often fall into tv traps expanding stories for larger audiences, or they get canceled very early on. The small number of coming-of-age films they do produce with any mild success often get quick sequels to cash in.
Netflix, in particular, has found success with its rapid production of coming-of-age film franchises like To All The Boys I’ve Ever Loved Before (18), The Kissing Booth (18), and Tall Girl (19).
Today’s Coming-of-Age Genre and Diversity
A majority of coming-of-age films from the past decade have seen a significant increase in telling stories of diversity. Many deal with themes of homosexuality, race, immigration, mental or physical disorders, and various generational traumas.
It was once rare to see coming-of-age stories like Boyz n the Hood (91), Crooklyn (94), Boy’s Don’t Cry (99), and Real Women Have Curves (02).
Those films helped pave the way for many studios are investing in rich and diverse stories. This extends to a multitude of communities and diverse groups and characters seen in films like Moonlight, Dope (15), Love, Simon (18), We the Animals (18), The Half of It (20), Dear Evan Hansen (21).
This even includes animated coming-of-age films like Spirited Away (01), Moana (16), Coco (17), Encanto (21), and Turning Red (22).
The coming-of-age genre will never go away. It’s genuinely been wonderful to see the genre grow and become more inclusive. As long as people continue to age, children will become adults, and adults will look back with a fondness on those troubling and tough-to-navigate years.
Cover via Universal Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock.
More Articles Like This: | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 29 | https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/ | en | The STEM Gap: Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics | [
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] | null | [] | 2020-02-25T15:32:46+00:00 | Giving women equal opportunities to pursue — and thrive in — STEM careers helps narrow the gender pay gap, enhances women’s economic security and ensures a diverse and talented STEM workforce and prevents biases in these fields and the products and services they produce. | en | /app/themes/aauw/assets/images/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png | AAUW : Empowering Women Since 1881 | https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/the-stem-gap/ | Girls and women are systematically tracked away from science and math throughout their education, limiting their access, preparation and opportunities to go into these fields as adults.
Women make up only 34% of the workforce in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and men vastly outnumber women majoring in most STEM fields in college. The gender gaps are particularly high in some of the fastest-growing and highest-paid jobs of the future, like computer science and engineering.
Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics
Learn more about how we can change policies and practices to increase opportunities in STEM for girls and women.
Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women's Success in Engineering & Computing
Engineering and computer science — two of the most lucrative STEM fields — remain heavily male dominated. Only 21% of engineering majors and 19% of computer science majors are women. Read AAUW’s research report for ways we can stop steering girls away from math and science, and make these fields more welcoming for women.
Tracking Girls and Women Out of Higher-Paying STEM Areas
Giving women equal opportunities to pursue — and thrive in — STEM careers helps narrow the gender pay gap, enhances women’s economic security, ensures a diverse and talented STEM workforce and prevents biases in these fields and the products and services they produce.
A typical STEM worker earns two-thirds more than those employed in other fields, according to Pew Research Center. And some of the highest-earning STEM occupations, such as computer science and engineering, have the lowest percentages of women workers.
Key factors perpetuating gender STEM gaps:
Gender Stereotypes: STEM fields are often viewed as masculine, and teachers and parents often underestimate girls’ math abilities starting as early as preschool.
Male-Dominated Cultures: Because fewer women study and work in STEM, these fields tend to perpetuate inflexible, exclusionary, male-dominated cultures that are not supportive of or attractive to women and minorities.
Fewer Role Models: girls have fewer role models to inspire their interest in these fields, seeing limited examples of female scientists and engineers in books, media and popular culture. There are even fewer Black women role models in math and science.
Math Anxiety: Teachers, who are predominantly women, often have math anxiety they pass onto girls, and they often grade girls harder for the same work, and assume girls need to work harder to achieve the same level as boys.
The Confidence Gap
The myth of the math brain is one of the most self-destructive ideas in American education – research shows no innate cognitive biological differences between men and women in math.
Many girls lose confidence in math by third grade. Boys, on the other hand, are more likely to say they are strong in math by 2nd grade, before any performance differences are evident.
A gendered math gap exists in elementary school — but it is really only evident among boys from higher-income and predominantly white areas performing significantly higher in math, even compared to girls attending those same schools.
Girls score higher than boys in math in lower-income, predominantly Black areas (representing around one-quarter of school districts), but their scores are still disproportionately low compared to scores for white boys in high-income areas.
Women are Underrepresented in STEM Workforce
By the time students reach college, women are significantly underrepresented in STEM majors — for instance, only around 21% of engineering majors are women and only around 19% of computer and information science majors are women.
Nearly 80% of the health care workforce are women, but only about 21% of health executives and board members are women, and only about a third of doctors. And, women are more highly represented in lower-paying fields, such as home health workers, nurses and the lower-paying specialties such as pediatricians.
38% of women who major in computers work in computer fields, and only 24% of those who majored in engineering work in the engineering field.
Men in STEM annual salaries are nearly $15,000 higher per year than women ($85,000 compared to $60,828). And Latina and Black women in STEM earn around $33,000 less (at an average of around $52,000 a year).
Dell-AAUW Playbook on Best Practices: Gender Equity in Tech
A product of a partnership between AAUW and Dell, the Playbook on Best Practices: Gender Equity in Tech equips advocates and employers with data-driven strategies and actionable steps to increase the representation of women in engineering and computing fields – to accelerate the rate of change and break through barriers for women in the workplace.
Closing the STEM Gap
Raise awareness that girls and women are as capable as boys.
Give girls equitable encouragement and educational opportunities.
Promote public awareness to parents about how they can encourage daughters as much as sons in math and science — supporting learning opportunities and positive messages about their abilities.
Teach girls, teachers and parents that math skills are learned and change over time — promoting a growth mindset that empowers girls to embrace challenges.
Emphasize strong and visible role models of women and women of color in math and science fields.
Provide professional development to teachers — addressing implicit and systemic biases to raise awareness about girls’ math abilities, avoid passing on math anxiety and ensure boys and girls are held to the same standards.
Encourage girls and women to take math and science classes — including advanced classes.
Reduce tracking and high-stakes assessment in early grades that reinforce biases and stereotypes.
Ensure every student is exposed to engineering and computer science, and Next Generation Science Standards in K–12.
Change how classes are taught by connecting STEM experiences to girls’ lives, promoting active, hands-on learning and emphasizing ways STEM is collaborative and community-oriented.
Teach girls of color math through open-ended and co-created problem posing and discovery.
Expand after-school and summer STEM opportunities for girls.
Increase awareness of higher education and career opportunities, pathway opportunities, role models and mentoring programs with women — especially women of color — in STEM for girls.
Design courses and change environments and practices in STEM studies to be more welcoming for women.
Prioritize diverse, inclusive and respectful environments, and strong, diverse leadership.
Diffuse hierarchical and dependent relationships between trainees and faculty, changing power dynamics.
Make the entire academic community responsible for reducing and preventing sexual harassment, ensure transparency and accountability, and support targets of sexual harassment.
Campuses should fully enforce Title IX in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Promote mentorship, sponsorship networking and incorporate male ally programs.
Break Biases
I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, ‘What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?’ | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 0 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Woman | en | Pretty Woman | [
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For other uses, see Pretty Woman (disambiguation).
Pretty WomanDirected byGarry MarshallWritten byJ. F. LawtonProduced byStarringCinematographyCharles MinskyEdited byMusic byJames Newton Howard
Production
companies
Distributed byBuena Vista Pictures Distribution
Release date
Running time
119 minutesCountryUnited StatesLanguageEnglishBudget$14 millionBox office$463.4 million
Pretty Woman is a 1990 American romantic comedy film directed by Garry Marshall, from a screenplay by J. F. Lawton. The film stars Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, and features Héctor Elizondo, Ralph Bellamy (in his final performance), Laura San Giacomo, and Jason Alexander in supporting roles.[1] The film's story centers on Hollywood escort Vivian Ward and wealthy businessman Edward Lewis. Vivian is hired to be Edward's escort for several business and social functions, and their relationship develops during her week-long stay with him. The film's title Pretty Woman is based on the 1964 song "Oh, Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison. The original screenplay was titled “3,000,” and was written by then-struggling screenwriter J. F. Lawton.
Originally intended to be a dark cautionary tale about class and sex work in Los Angeles, the film was re-conceived as a romantic comedy with a large budget. Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics upon release, but widespread praise was directed towards Roberts' performance. It saw the highest number of ticket sales in the US ever for a romantic comedy,[2] with Box Office Mojo listing it as the number-one romantic comedy by the highest estimated domestic tickets sold at 42,176,400, slightly ahead of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) at 41,419,500 tickets.[3] The film grossed US$463.4 million worldwide and at the time of its release, was the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, behind only E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ($701 million at the time), Star Wars ($530 million at the time), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ($474 million at the time), and Jaws ($470 million at the time). It was also the highest grossing R-rated film released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, holding the record for 34 years until Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed it in 2024.
Pretty Woman catapulted Roberts to superstardom, earning her the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical, in addition to her first nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The film also received nominations for the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.
Plot
[edit]
One night, leaving a business party in the Hollywood Hills, Edward takes his lawyer Philip's Lotus Esprit and finds himself in the red-light district on Hollywood Boulevard. There he meets struggling prostitute Vivian Ward.
Lost and struggling to operate the stick-shift, Vivian offers to drive Edward to the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Impulsively, he hires her for the whole night and, despite initial awkwardness, finds her charming and they have sex in his penthouse suite.
The following day, Edward asks Vivian to stay for the week, as he must attend a series of business events while attempting to acquire Jim Morse's shipbuilding company. After negotiating, Edward and Vivian agree on $3,000. He also gives her money to buy appropriate clothes.
However, when trying to shop on Rodeo Drive, snobbish and rude saleswomen turn Vivian away. She asks the hotel manager Barney for assistance. He gets upscale store saleslady Bridget, who is very kind, to find her a cocktail dress for that evening's business dinner. Later, Barney teaches her table etiquette.
Edward is astounded by Vivian’s transformation. At dinner, he introduces Vivian to Morse and his grandson David, who is to take over the company. The Morses are charmed by her, but ultimately the dinner does not go well as they are unhappy with Edward's plan to dismantle their company.
Edward opens up to the transformed Vivian. He reveals details about his personal and business life, including his estranged relationship with his late father Carter.
When Philip suspects Vivian is a corporate spy, as he sees her talking to David Morse at a polo match, Edward explains their arrangement. The married lawyer later crudely propositions her for her services after Edward leaves. She gets upset with Edward for exposing her in that way. He apologizes, admitting that he was jealous of Vivian talking to David and acknowledging that her directness is having a positive effect on him.
Edward takes Vivian by private jet to see La traviata at the San Francisco Opera, a story about a prostitute who falls in love with a wealthy man. She is moved, and she breaks her "no kissing" rule before having sex with him. Believing Edward has fallen asleep, Vivian says she loves him.
As the week is almost finished, Edward offers to get Vivian a condominium and an allowance, promising to visit her regularly. However, Vivian is offended, feeling he is now treating her like a prostitute. She tells her childhood fantasy of being rescued by a knight on a white steed.
Edward meets with Morse but, influenced by Vivian, chooses to work with him to save his company instead of dismantling it. Meanwhile Philip, furious that Edward's new direction has cost him a fortune, goes to the Beverly Wilshire to confront him. However, he finds Vivian. So, blaming her for Edward's changes and angry at his business decision, Philip hits her and attempts to rape her. Edward arrives, pulls Philip off of Vivian, punches and fires him.
After completing his business in Los Angeles, Edward asks Vivian to stay with him for one more night, but only if she wants to, not because he is paying her. She gently refuses and leaves after telling him she thinks he has "lots of special gifts."
Vivian returns to her apartment hotel to pack for her move to San Francisco to get a new job and finish her high school degree. She gives her roommate, fellow prostitute Kity De Luca, some money and tells her she has "a lot of potential." Kit leaves sex work and enrolls in beauty classes. Vivian then waits in her apartment for the bus.
Vivian's rejection prompts Edward to re-evaluate his life, so he reroutes the chauffeur to her apartment instead of the airport. He climbs out of the white limousine's sunroof and ascends the fire escape to 'rescue' Vivian, just like the knight in her childhood fantasy. When he asks her what happens after the knight rescues her, she responds "She rescues him right back", and kisses him.
Cast
[edit]
As per the opening credits
Richard Gere as Edward Lewis, a rich corporate raider from New York who hires Vivian to be his escort for a week
Julia Roberts as Vivian Ward, a free-spirited Hollywood prostitute
Ralph Bellamy as Jim Morse, owner of Morse Industries, a troubled shipbuilding company Edward plans to take over
Jason Alexander as Philip Stuckey, Edward's insensitive lawyer
Héctor Elizondo as Barnard "Barney" Thompson, the dignified and soft-hearted hotel manager
Laura San Giacomo as Kit De Luca, Vivian's sarcastic wisecracking best friend and roommate who taught her the prostitution trade
Alex Hyde-White as David Morse, Jim Morse's grandson, who is being groomed to take over the Morses' shipbuilding company
Amy Yasbeck as Elizabeth Stuckey, Philip's wife
Elinor Donahue as Bridget, a friend of Barney Thompson who works in a women's clothing store
John David Carson as Mark Roth, a businessman in Edward's office
Judith Baldwin as Susan, one of Edward's ex-girlfriends whom he runs into at Phil's party at the beginning of the film. She has recently married and Edward's secretary was a bridesmaid.
Patrick Richwood as Night Elevator Operator Dennis
James Patrick Stuart as Dennis Rowland, the day bellhop
Dey Young as a snobbish saleswoman in a clothing store
Larry Miller as Mr. Hollister, the manager of a clothing store where Vivian buys her new wardrobe
Hank Azaria as a detective (film debut)
Jason Randal as a magician
Production
[edit]
Development
[edit]
The film was initially conceived as a dark drama about prostitution in Los Angeles in the 1980s.[4] The relationship between Vivian and Edward also originally involved controversial themes, including Vivian being addicted to drugs; part of the deal was that she had to stay off cocaine for a week. Edward eventually throws her out of his car and drives off. The original script by J. F. Lawton, called 3000,[5] ended with Vivian and her prostitute friend on the bus to Disneyland.[4] Producer Laura Ziskin considered these elements detrimental to a sympathetic portrayal of Vivian, and they were removed or assigned to Kit. The deleted scenes have been found, and some were included on the DVD released for the film's 15th anniversary.[4] In one, Vivian tells Edward, "I could just pop ya good and be on my way," indicating her lack of interest in "pillow talk." In another, she is confronted by a drug dealer, Carlos, then rescued by Edward when the limo driver Darryl gets his gun out.
Though inspired by such films as Wall Street and The Last Detail,[5] the film bears a resemblance to Pygmalion myths: particularly George Bernard Shaw's play of the same name, which also formed the basis for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady. It was Walt Disney Studios then-president Jeffrey Katzenberg who insisted the film be re-written as a modern-day fairy tale and love story, as opposed to the original dark drama. It was pitched to Touchstone Pictures and re-written as a romantic comedy.[6] The title 3000 was changed because Disney executives thought it sounded like a title for a science fiction film.[7]
Casting
[edit]
The casting of the film was a rather lengthy process. Marshall had initially considered Christopher Reeve, Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Kline, and Denzel Washington for the role of Edward, and Albert Brooks,[8] Sylvester Stallone, Al Pacino and Burt Reynolds turned it down.[9][10] Pacino went as far as doing a casting reading with Roberts before rejecting the part.[11] Sam Neill, Tom Conti and Charles Grodin tested for the part along with Roberts.[1][12] Gere initially refused but when he met with Roberts, she persuaded him and he eventually agreed to play Lewis.[13] He reportedly started off much more active in his role; but Garry Marshall took him aside and said "No, no, no, Richard. In this movie, one of you moves and one of you does not. Guess which one you are?"[14]
Julia Roberts was not the first choice for the role of Vivian, and was not wanted by Disney. Many other actresses were considered. Marshall originally envisioned Karen Allen for the role; when she declined, auditions went to many better-known actresses of the time including Molly Ringwald,[15] who turned it down as she didn't like the story as she felt there was something icky about it.[16][17] Winona Ryder auditioned, but was turned down because Marshall felt she was "too young."[10] Jennifer Connelly was also dismissed for the same reason.[4] Emily Lloyd turned it down as it conflicted with her shooting for the film Mermaids.[18] Drew Barrymore, Patricia Arquette, Brooke Shields, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Davis also auditioned for the role of Vivian.[19][20] Meg Ryan, who was the studio and Marshall's top choice, turned it down as well.[21] According to a note written by Marshall, Mary Steenburgen was also among the first choices. Diane Lane came very close to being cast (the script was much darker at the time); they had gone as far as costume fittings, but due to scheduling conflicts she could not accept. Michelle Pfeiffer turned the role down, saying she did not like the script's "tone."[22] Daryl Hannah was also considered but believed the role was "degrading to women."[22] Valeria Golino was in consideration, but was not selected because of her thick Italian accent,[23] and Jennifer Jason Leigh had auditioned.[24] Lea Thompson unsuccessfully auditioned for the role as she thought the film was a drama.[25]
When all the other actresses turned down the role, 21-year-old Julia Roberts, a relative unknown, with only the sleeper hit Mystic Pizza (1988) and the yet-to-be-released Steel Magnolias (1989), for which she would be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, won the role of Vivian. Her performance made her a star. J. F. Lawton, writer of the original screenplay, has suggested that the film was ultimately given a happy ending because of the chemistry of Gere and Roberts.[5]
Veteran actor Ralph Bellamy, who plays James Morse, appears in his final acting performance before his death in 1991. Jason Alexander, who had also recently been cast for his role as the bumbling George Costanza in Seinfeld, was cast as Philip Stuckey. A VHS copy of Pretty Woman would appear in Seinfeld's apartment in later seasons of Seinfeld as a homage to Alexander's participation in the film.
Filming
[edit]
The film's budget was substantial, at $14 million, so producers could shoot in many locations.[4] Most filming took place in Los Angeles, California, specifically in Beverly Hills, and inside soundstages at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. The escargot restaurant the "Voltaire" was shot at the restaurant "Rex," now called "Cicada." Scenes set in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel lobby were shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Filming commenced on July 24, 1989, but was immediately plagued by problems. These included Ferrari and Porsche declining the product placement opportunity for the car Edward drove, neither firm wishing to be associated with prostitutes.[4] Lotus Cars saw the placement value and supplied a Silver 1989+1⁄2 Esprit SE (which was later sold).[26]
The shooting was a generally pleasant, easy-going experience, as the budget was broad and the shooting schedule was not tight.[4] While shooting the scene where Vivian is lying down on the floor of Edward's penthouse, watching reruns of I Love Lucy, Garry Marshall had to tickle Roberts' feet (out of camera range) to get her to laugh.[27] The scene in which Gere playfully snaps the lid of a jewelry case on her fingers was improvised, and her surprised laugh was genuine. The red dress Vivian wears to the opera has been listed among the most unforgettable dresses of all time.[28]
During the scene in which Roberts sang a Prince song in the bathtub, slid down, and submerged her head under the bubbles; she emerged to find the crew had left except for the cameraman, who captured the moment on film. In the love scene, she was so stressed that a vein became noticeable on her forehead and had to be massaged by Marshall and Gere. She also developed a case of hives, and calamine lotion was used to soothe her skin until filming resumed.[4] The filming was completed on November 30.[29]
Shelley Michelle acted as body double for Roberts in risqué scenes and the film's publicity poster.[30]
Reception
[edit]
Box office
[edit]
In its opening weekend, the film was at number one at the US box office, grossing $11,280,591 and averaging $8,513 per theater.[31][32] Despite dropping to number two in its second weekend, it grossed more with $12,471,670.[32] It returned to number one at the US box office in its sixth weekend and was number one for three weeks. It was in the Top 10 movies in the US for 16 weeks.[32] In Australia, it was number one for 12 weeks and was number one for nine consecutive weeks in the UK. As of September 29, 2009 , it has grossed $178,406,268 in the United States and $285,000,000 in other countries for a total worldwide gross of US$463,406,268.[3] It was the fourth highest-grossing film of the year in the United States and Canada[33] and the third highest-grossing worldwide.[34] The film was Disney's highest-grossing film ever, surpassing Three Men and a Baby. It was also Disney's highest-grossing R-rated release until Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024.[35][36][37]
Critical response
[edit]
Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics.[38][39][40][41] On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 65% based on 77 reviews, with an average rating of 6.0/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Pretty Woman may be a yuppie fantasy, but the film's slick comedy, soundtrack, and casting can overcome misgivings."[42] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews."[43] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[44]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "D," saying it "starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy" and with "its tough-hooker heroine, it can work as a feminist version of an upscale princess fantasy." Gleiberman also said it "pretends to be about how love transcends money," but "is really obsessed with status symbols."[45] On its twentieth anniversary, Gleiberman wrote another article, saying that while he felt he was right, he would have given it a "B" today.[46] Carina Chocano of The New York Times said the movie "wasn't a love story, it was a money story. Its logic depended on a disconnect between character and narrative, between image and meaning, between money and value, and that made it not cluelessly traditional but thoroughly postmodern."[47] Roberts would later say in a 2019 interview that she believes that the film would not be made today.[48]
Accolades
[edit]
Award Category Nominee(s) Result Academy Awards[49] Best Actress Julia Roberts Nominated BMI Film & TV Awards Film Music Award James Newton Howard Won Most Performed Song from a Film "It Must Have Been Love" – Per Gessle Won British Academy Film Awards[50] Best Film Arnon Milchan, Steven Reuther and Garry Marshall Nominated Best Actress in a Leading Role Julia Roberts Nominated Best Screenplay – Original J. F. Lawton Nominated Best Costume Design Marilyn Vance Nominated César Awards Best Foreign Film Garry Marshall Nominated David di Donatello Awards Best Foreign Actress Julia Roberts Nominated Golden Globe Awards[51] Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy Nominated Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy Julia Roberts Won Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy Richard Gere Nominated Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture Hector Elizondo Nominated Golden Screen Awards Won Jupiter Awards Best International Actress Julia Roberts Won Kids' Choice Awards Favorite Movie Actress Won People's Choice Awards Favorite Comedy Motion Picture Won Writers Guild of America Awards[52] Best Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen J. F. Lawton Nominated
American Film Institute
[edit]
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions – #21[53]
Music
[edit]
Main article: Pretty Woman (soundtrack)
The soundtrack features the songs (among others);
"Oh, Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison, which inspired its title
Roxette's "It Must Have Been Love," originally released in December 1987, reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1990
"King of Wishful Thinking" by Go West
"Show Me Your Soul" by Red Hot Chili Peppers
"No Explanation" by Peter Cetera
"Wild Women Do" by Natalie Cole
"Fallen" by Lauren Wood
The soundtrack has been certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).[54]
The opera featured in the film is La Traviata, which also served as inspiration for its plot. The highly dramatic aria fragment that is repeated is the end of "Dammi tu forza!" ("Give me strength!"), from the opera. Roberts sings the song "Kiss" by Prince while she is in the tub and Gere's character is on the phone. Background music is composed by James Newton Howard. The piano piece Gere's character plays in the hotel lobby was composed and performed by Gere. Entitled "He Sleeps/Love Theme," this piano composition is inspired by Bruce Springsteen's "Racing in the Street."
Musical adaptation
[edit]
Main article: Pretty Woman: The Musical
A stage musical adaptation of the film opened on Broadway on July 20, 2018, in previews, officially on August 16 at the Nederlander Theatre.[55] This follows an out-of-town tryout at the Oriental Theatre in Chicago, which ran from March 13 to April 15, 2018. The musical has music and lyrics by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance; the late Garry Marshall and J. F. Lawton wrote the book; and Jerry Mitchell is the director and choreographer.[56] The Chicago and Broadway cast featured Samantha Barks, in her Broadway debut as Vivian and Steve Kazee as Edward. Barks finished her run as Vivian on July 21, 2019, and was replaced by Jillian Mueller the following evening, with Brennin Hunt, of Rent fame, assuming the role of Edward.[56] Orfeh portrayed Kit, and Jason Danieley played Philip Stuckey. Eric Anderson portrayed the role of Mr. Thompson and Kingsley Leggs played the role of James Morse.[55]
The UK and Ireland stage musical tour commenced in Autumn 2023. The show opened in Bristol with cast members, Amber Davies as Vivian, Oliver Savile as Edward. Ore Oduba played Mr Thompson. The run is scheduled to continue through most of 2024.[57]
References
[edit] | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 65 | https://www.seventeen.com/life/g2155/best-chick-flicks/ | en | Girls' Night Chick Flick Movies to Watch | [
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"best chick flicks",
"girls night movies",
"best girl movies",
"best movies for girls",
"chick flicks",
"best night movies",
"movies for girls night"
] | null | [
"Neha Gandhi",
"Noelle Devoe",
"Tamara Fuentes"
] | 2017-12-14T20:12:00+00:00 | Don’t waste half the night scrolling through Netflix, debating which chick flick to watch. Here are the best chick flicks for the ultimate girls night in. | en | /_assets/design-tokens/seventeen/static/images/favicon.b900dc8.ico | Seventeen | https://www.seventeen.com/life/g2155/best-chick-flicks/ | Watching a good movie with your besties is one of the best ways to spend your weekend. If you don't want to waste half the night debating which chick flick to watch, you've come to the right place. From classic teen comedies like Mean Girls to new romantic tearjerkers like The Photograph, there are so many amazing chick flicks to choose from. Whether you’re in the mood for something no one has seen before or want to opt for an old favorite that you can recite every line to, here are the all-time best chick flicks that'll get your girls' night started the right way.
Tamara Fuentes is the current Entertainment Editor at Cosmopolitan, where she covers TV, movies, books, celebrities, and more. She can often be found in front of a screen fangirling about something new. Before joining Cosmopolitan, she was the entertainment editor over at Seventeen. She is also a member of the Television Critics Association and the Latino Entertainment Journalists Association. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 91 | https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/17-top-female-scientists-who-have-changed-the-worl/ | en | 17 Famous Female Scientists Who Helped Change the World | [
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] | null | [
"Colleen Curry"
] | 2017-02-10T19:05:57+00:00 | These STEM superstars literally changed everything. | en | https://static.globalcitizen.org/static/img/favicon.fb497794bcd4.ico | Global Citizen | https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/17-top-female-scientists-who-have-changed-the-worl/ | Saturday we celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, and while this has been a remarkable year for recognition of women in science (hello, “Hidden Figures”) there are still hundreds of relatively-unknown women who have changed the world with their research throughout history.
Amid a global push to get more girls interested in science, engineering, technology, and math, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate those who already are STEM superstars of the past and present.
Take Action: Check Your Voter Registration Status With 'Just Vote' Here
Take a look at 17 of the best female scientists up to (and including) 2017. And let’s hope these ladies don’t remain hidden too much longer.
1. Tiera Guinn
This 21-year-old scientist hasn’t yet graduated from college, but Tiera Guinn’s already doing literal rocket science. The MIT senior is helping build a rocket for NASA that could be one of the biggest and most powerful ever made, according to WBRC News. She’s an aerospace major with a 5.0 GPA who also works as a Rocket Structural Design and Analysis Engineer for the Space Launch System that aerospace company Boeing is building for NASA.
“You have to look forward to your dream and you can’t let anybody get in the way of it,” she said. “No matter how tough it may be, no matter how many tears you might cry, you have to keep pushing. And you have to understand that nothing comes easy. Keeping your eyes on the prize, you can succeed.”
2. Marie Curie
We all know the name of this physicist and chemist, but do you recall Marie Curie’s contributions to science? The Polish scientist studied at the Sorbonne, where she became the head of the physics lab there in the early 1900s — when women really did not teach science at European universities — and pioneered research in radioactivity. She and her husband jointly won the Nobel Prize in 1903.
3. Elizabeth Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell, who was born in 1821, was the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States (Geneva Medical College in upstate New York), became an activist for poor women’s health, and went on to found a medical school for women in England.
4. Jane Goodall
The most famous primate scientist in history, Jane Goodall was renowned for her work with chimpanzees and as a champion of animal rights. And Goodall wasn’t just working in a lab; she climbed trees and mimicked the behavior of chimps in Tanzania to gain their trust and study them in their natural habitat.
5. Mae C. Jemison
Mae C. Jemison is the first African-American female astronaut. In 1992, she became the first black woman in space when as a crew member on the space ship Endeavour. Before entering the space program, she was a medical doctor who served with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
6. Jennifer Doudna
Jennifer Doudna is one of the most culturally significant scientists studying today. She helped developed CRISPR, the genetic-engineering method that could allow for “designer babies” but also for the eradication or treatment of sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, and HIV. She is a professor at UC Berkeley.
7. Katherine Freese
Freese is a trailblazing modern scientist who studies dark matter, including studying “dark stars” in the universe, something that has never been observed directly by a human. She’s the Director of Nordita, an institute for theoretical physics in Stockholm.
8. Rachel Carson
In the 1960s, one environmental scientist’s voice rose above the rest to become central to American politics, culture, and foreign policy: Rachel Carson’s. Her book, “Silent Spring,” warned of the dangers of pesticides and chemicals to humans, plants, and animals, and was a landmark in the nation’s environmental history.
9. Maria Goeppert Mayer
A German immigrant to the US who studied at Johns Hopkins during the Great Depression, Maria Goeppert Mayer, born in 1906, persisted in her studies even when no university would employ her and went onto become a chemical physicist. Her most famous contribution to modern physics is discovering the nuclear shell of the atomic nucleus, for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1963.
10. Sara Seager
By the time women were being trained as university scientists, the “solar system” had been pretty well-mapped. But Sara Seager, born in 1971, has discovered 715 planets in her time working with the Kepler Space Telescope, a remarkable contributor to the modern understanding of space.
11. Jane Cooke Wright
One of the first female African American doctors, Jane Cooke Wright, born in 1919, was a trailblazing cancer researcher who worked closely with her father at Harvard, where she began testing individualized chemotherapy treatments for cancer patients.
12. Vera Rubin
Vera Rubin, who was born in 1928, proved that dark matter existed in the universe by concluding that invisible gravity sources were pulling planets and stars in certain directions. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1993 by President Clinton. In its obituary for Rubin, who died Dec. 25, 2016, the New York Times wrote, “Dr. Rubin, cheerful and plain-spoken, had a lifelong love of the stars, championed women in science and was blunt about the limits of humankind’s vaunted knowledge of nature.”
13. Sau Lan Wu
Hong Kong scientist Sau Lan Wu is a particle physicist who warmed up her theatrical career by discovering charm quarks and gluons, and then really changed the entire course of scientific history by helping to discover the Higgs boson particle, which is still the subject of cutting-edge science today.
14. Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin, born in 1920, was a British biophysicist known for revolutionary work discovering DNA, as well as understanding X-rays and molecular structure.
15. Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her studies of the genetic makeup of corn, and specifically, her discovery of genetic transposition, or the ability of genes to change position on the chromosome.
16. Rita Levi-Montalcini
The Italian neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini won a Nobel in 1986 for discovering what is known as Nerve growth factor. According to the New York Times, her work on nerve growth led to discoveries on how that growth can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer.
17. Gertrude Elion
Another Nobel winner, Gertrude Elion, born in 1918, was a biochemist and pharmacologist who developed drugs to treat leukemia and prevent kidney transplant rejection. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 88 | https://www.indiewire.com/feature/most-beautiful-movies-best-cinematography-21st-century-1201881703/ | en | The Best Cinematography of the 21st Century | [
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"Jim Hemphill",
"Chris O'Falt",
"Bill Desowitz",
"Sarah Shachat"
] | 2023-05-03T17:00:00+00:00 | From "Amélie" to "Zodiac," IndieWire names the 60 feature films with the best cinematography of the 21st century. | en | IndieWire | https://www.indiewire.com/feature/most-beautiful-movies-best-cinematography-21st-century-1201881703/ | The technology of cinematography has undergone some of the most seismic shifts in film history this century, with what began in the 2000s as an almost entirely photochemical process transforming into the digitally captured, manipulated, and projected images of today. The art of cinematography, however — using light, color, and texture to express ideas and elicit emotional reactions from the audience — remains intact.
In 2017, IndieWire made a list of the best-shot feature films of the century thus far; the list was updated in 2020, and what follows is the third and most extensive version of the list. It’s also the first to be spearheaded by the IndieWire Craft team, which has grown considerably since this list was first published. Ranking cinematography is, in some ways, a fool’s errand given the broad variety of genres, resources, and intentions encompassed by the films below, but these are 60 titles that IndieWire believes will stand the test of time.
Honorable Mention
“1917”; “All These Sleepless Nights”; “Antichrist”; “Birth”; “Black Swan”; “Bright Star”; “Burning,”; “Collateral”; “Decision to Leave”; “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”; “Dunkirk”; “The Fall”; “Fire Will Come”; “The Fountain”; “The Grand Budapest Hotel”; “The Grandmaster”; “The Great Beauty”; “Her”; “Isle of Dogs”; “Ixcanul”; “Killing Them Softly”; “La La Land”; “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”; “Let the Right One In”; “Leviathan”; “Lust, Caution”; “Macbeth”; “The Master”; “Melancholia”; “Midsommar”; “Neon Bull”; “New World”; “No Country For Old Men”; “No Time To Die”; “Pan’s Labyrinth”; “Parasite”; “The Prestige”; “Renoir”; “The Revenant”; “Rush”; “Sicario,”; “Silent Light”; “Spectre”; “Spring Breakers”; “Tragedy of Macbeth”; “The Turin Horse”; “Uncut Gems”; “Under The Skin”; “What Lies Beneath”; “Wonderstruck”; “Y Tu Mama Tambien”; “Zama”
60. “Zodiac” (2007)
The late Harris Savides didn’t want to shoot “Zodiac” digitally, but he proved to be the perfect cinematographer to take the medium to the next level. Savides was the master of milky blacks, doing incredible work with low contrasts to create a unique look that cinematographers are still trying to emulate today. With “Zodiac,” David Fincher and Savides created a different type of noir look. Savides abandoned the hard shadows of low-key lighting, trading in strong directional lighting sources for more even, low-wattage, practical sources where the light slowly curved into darkness. Every bit as evocative but more realistic than traditional stylized noir cinematography, we could just make out details in Savides’ dark corners of the frame — the perfect look for Fincher’s documenting of the elusive search for a real-life serial killer. “Zodiac” marked the maturation of digital cinematography as its own distinct paintbrush that could create its own unique beauty while fitting in with Hollywood production values. —Chris O’Falt
59. “The Dark Knight” (2008)
The second part of Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy was a turning point in his career and in his collaboration with cinematographer Wally Pfister, elevating a DC superhero film into a gritty crime drama with gravitas. Fittingly, Pfister chose a color palette that emphasized green and blue in keeping with Joker’s look. But the cinematographer also introduced brightness in surprising ways, such as when Batman (Christian Bale) flips on the light switch during his brutal interrogation of Joker. Pfister shot primarily in Kodak 35mm with Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL and Platinum cameras. However, Nolan wanted to embrace large format in a big way, and so this became the first mainstream feature to be shot with the IMAX 65mm camera, which launched the IMAX revolution. In all, there were 28 minutes shot in IMAX (including the astonishing six-minute bank heist prologue that immediately conveyed the immense scale of Gotham City). Yet rather than cropping the 2:35:1 image, Nolan and Pfister filled the entire screen with an aspect ratio of 4:3. Ever since, Nolan has steadily increased his reliance on IMAX, building the brand into a reliable theatrical venue for spectacle. —Bill Desowitz
58. “The Intruder”
Director Claire Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard’s most enigmatic film unfolds like a dream but the imagery is never dreamlike. Instead, it is grounded in a strong sense of place and season — the film moves fluidly through time and space of snowy Alpines, French countryside, tropical Tahiti, and urban Korea — as Godard’s compositions and light produce images that are sensory, never adorned, and elicit in the viewer a sense of being touched or the feel of sun hitting wet skin. And it is often Godard’s camera that gives the film its sense of narrative propulsion, as a simple handheld journey down a back road or a long lens shot interjects a mounting sense there is something primal lurking in the film’s past and future. The culmination of this is a visceral scene of being dragged by horses through the snow, in which the cinematographer holding the camera on a sled accomplished more than a blockbuster’s army of technicians could ever dream. Not since “Beau Travail” has Denis’ raw brand of cinematic poetry been so dependent on her visual collaborator’s ability to translate into images. —CO
57. “Vitalina Varela” (2019)
When many awards voters watched Portugal’s 2020 Oscar entry via a screening link there was chatter the film was too dark, that director Pedro Costa’s return to the Lisbon neighborhood of Fontainhas made Bradford Young’s cinematography look like a studio comedy in comparison. But those lucky enough to see it properly projected experienced cinematic Rembrandt in which luminous figures emerged from a world of literal and figurative darkness of grief and poverty. Like other arthouse filmmakers, digital cinematography has allowed Costa to strip down his filmmaking apparatus and embrace the authenticity of working with non-professional actors, but the evolution of his cinema has moved sharply away from capturing an ordinary visual reality. Costa and cinematographer Leonardo Simões craft sublime compositions in which a sense of the spiritual shines through the harsh realities of poverty and grief. With “Vitalina Varela,” Costa pushed his cinema further underground — creating the feeling his characters dwell below the surface of society — and plunged it deeper into darkness (creating some of the most satisfying, rich blacks in the short history of digital), which becomes an apt canvas for his Murnau-like approach to telling the story in terms of light and dark. —CO
56. “The Untamed” (2016)
Early on in Amat Escalante’s “The Untamed” (“La region salvaje”), a young woman named Verónica (Simone Bucio) stumbles through a doorway and into the thickest fog imaginable. She is bleeding from her side and struggles to keep her balance. Chilean-born cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, who’s shot all of Lars von Trier’s directorial projects since “Melancholia,” tracks her hazy escape with his handheld digital camera. Although filmed in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, the scene visually evokes an alien environment where disorientation and the lack of visibility instill a fear of the unknown. It’s as if she’d just landed on another planet. That it follows a sexual encounter between a human and an extraterrestrial being only reinforces that unsettling feeling. With mostly naturalistic lighting throughout the hard-hitting drama and some ethereally lit, idyllic shots of nature near where the creature lives, Claro seamlessly blends the social realism that characterizes Escalante’s works with the singular sci-fi elements at play here. —Carlos Aguilar
55. “Son of Saul” (2015)
Tight on the face of actor Géza Röhrig, the square frames of Hungarian cinematographer Mátyás Erdély place the audience within inescapable proximity of the horrors of the Holocaust. And yet, we never actually see the violence, as it plays out in the perpetually out-of-focus background that limits what visual information we have access to. That partial field of vision and constant uncertainty resembles how the prisoners inside the hell-like facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau experience daily life there. Fundamental to the immersive quality of director László Nemes’ debut feature is the synchronicity between Erdély’s handheld 35mm camera and the lead performer while moving across incessant, yet precisely choreographed, chaos. Long takes carry us through the abhorrent pipeline of extermination following a man in pursuit of a sliver of humanity. From its opening frame, where blurry figures emerge from a distorted landscape and become recognizable as human beings the closer they get to the lens, to its devastating final shot, the cinematography of “Son of Saul” qualifies as a masterclass in the organic amalgamation between craftsmanship and theme. —CA
54. “Enter the Void” (2010)
With the recent advent (and vast improvements) of adjustable, lightweight, and affordable-color LED lighting, Benoit Debie’s body of work over the last 20 years (which relied more on gels, filters, and practicals) has become one of the most influential in modern cinematography. Filmmakers, now equipped with an easy way to experiment and incorporate color into their own lighting, are increasingly studying Debie’s bold use of color in his collaborations with Harmony Korine (“Spring Breakers” and “The Beach Bum”) and Gaspar Noé (“Climax,” “Irreversible”), but it’s the experimental “Enter the Void” that often leaves them speechless. The neon-lit world of Tokyo at night, characters taking psychedelic drugs, and the story of a wounded dealer having a somewhat out-of-body experience — all of these elements give Noé and Debie license to create a visual language of flashing, sometimes unstable images that feel like something new. Color is emotion and a state of mind, but also story itself. As with his Florida-set work with Korine, it’s not simply the color that Debie adds to the frame but how he filters and captures the color and feel of the world in front of his lens, which creates a palette unlike anything we’ve seen before. —CO
53. “The Lighthouse” (2019)
In some ways, especially if you went to college in New England, “The Lighthouse” looks like the most expensive student thesis film ever made. The film’s black and white imagery is confined to a handful of spare sets, all studiously dour, and the limited 1.1:9 aspect ratio feels closer to the expressive dread of Fritz Lang’s “M” than director Robert Eggars’ own brewing cauldron of atmosphere in “The Witch.” The formal choices that cinematographer Jarin Blaschke made to build the film’s (contained, claustrophobic) frames are as blunt as Willem Dafoe’s veteran lighthouse keeper’s manner. But the longer the film goes on, the more that Blaschke’s imagery repeats, and fragments, and refracts, beginning to take on a much more powerful, mythological feeling. The film flows from the logic of the imagery as it shifts, chimera-like, between the sharp, sudden violence of the land of the living to the haze of the fog, the mysterious realm where mermaids might live. Limited compositions become landscapes across Dafoe and Robert Pattinson’s faces. The great accomplishment of “The Lighthouse” is that Eggars and Blaschke’s absolute control over the image makes you feel the fires of hell without any color, and ocean all around. —Sarah Shachat
52. “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” (2011)
A group of men searches for a buried body as they’re led through small towns and the Turkish landscape by a suspect apparently too drunk to recall the murder. This theme of an elusive search for truth is hauntingly brought to life in every frame of director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki’s metaphysical noir. The imagery of Ceylan’s slow cinema approach evokes the stark void of Antonioni, the hypnotic atmosphere of Tarkovsky, and the melancholic widescreen landscape of Sergio Leone (whose “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “Once Upon a Time in America” are referenced by the film’s title). As the men share deeply personal details and secrets become revealed, the realism of the story is engulfed by the landscape and compositions that add a sense of darkness and despair to the proceedings. Remarkably, Tiryaki created such strong, all-encompassing (often wide shot) imagery using 1080 HDCAM camera (Sony F35 CineAlta 1080) and extremely rudimentary lighting; each composition is given the care and exactness of a well-balanced painting. —CO
51. “Mudbound” (2018)
When watching the rich, classical elegance of “Mudbound,” it’s easy to forget how much the filmmaking team went beyond its means (a $9 million dollar production budget) in creating the gorgeous, sprawling period film. Rachel Morrison’s cinematography is impressive not only because of the limitations imposed on it, though. Set in Mississippi in the 1940s, director Dee Rees’ film is as much about today as our country’s past, leading Morrison to avoid the golden nostalgia of traditional prestige Oscar bait. Shooting digitally, the cinematographer captures the specificity of the era’s WPA photographers, like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, who inspired the filmmaker’s approach. Morrison finds the humanity of this tragic story in its striking landscape. Yet the visually stunning movie was the product of simply capturing natural light. Images this sculpted don’t come easily when shooting in cramped, windowless sharecropper homes or under the harsh summer light of the deep south. Prior to “Mudbound,” Morrison was one of the independent film world’s most exciting talents. With this film, she entered the A list. —CO
50. “Black Hawk Down” (2001)
Ridley Scott’s historical war drama about the U.S. military’s 1993 raid in Mogadishu, which resulted in the deaths of 19 American soldiers and subsequent withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Somalia, was released three months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, making it unexpectedly — and nightmarishly — topical. It was shot by Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak using Arriflex 35 and 435 ES cameras, along with Moviecam Compact and Superlight cameras and using Angenieux HR Zoom and Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses. The film contained a desaturated look derived from muddy brown and olive tones to establish the desolate and bleak landscape of war-torn Mogadishu. To properly film the expansive action sequences, they shot with multiple camera setups, usually six to eight, with many more for the bigger sequences. Unlike many fast-cutting action films of the period, however, Scott preferred doing long, complex combat sequences from beginning to end, with cameras capturing specific moments as per their placement. This technique added to the spontaneity and authenticity of the battles. —BD
49. “Amélie” (2001)
None of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films take place in the real world. They always happen in a sideways universe that’s just one left turn from ours, where the visuals match the story’s emotionality and, crucially, its sense of humor. So it’s only fitting that, for a protagonist looking for love with a heart that beats just a little too fast, cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel washes the Paris of “Amelie” in lush, romantic reds and greens at every possible opportunity. It’s in that warmth of color and sense of heightened design that even the simplest dolly move in on Amélie (Audrey Tautou) seems just a bit more magical and important, and when Delbonnel gets on a tear, he does a whole lot more than push in. Delbonnel’s consistent center framing also helps the film’s moments of direct address come off as knowing and charming rather than winking and cringe. That is the true magic of “Amélie”: Its stylization invites the viewer further into Amélie’s longing, awestruck perspective of the world. It never distances us from the action and the emotion of the story. The imagery immerses us in the feeling of being a relentlessly curious, kind person for whom quests with garden gnomes and photo booth scavenger hunts as declarations of love are the norm. May all the films that claim to “immerse” the viewer inside a fictional world be even half as visually engaging as “Amélie.” —SS
48. “City of God” (2002)
César Charlone has been the cinematic eye for Fernando Meirelles on four projects, including the director’s portion of the anthology film “Rio, I Love You,” but their first collaboration is still their best and most vital work. “City of God” sets the bar high for handheld cinematography. The energy Charlone gives each tracking shot or hectic pan is so charged and kinetic that the movie’s cinematographer creates much of Meirelles’ boiling tension. What’s so incredible about the look of “City of God” is how none of the handheld shots distract from the vivid colors of the setting. The heat of the film’s Rio de Janeiro backdrop simmers in Charlone’s sweltering reds and oranges, and he fills the towns and suburbs with such rich palettes that the film is able to create a whole world of living, breathing culture on the fly. Handheld cinematography can be divisive, but “City of God” proves just how dynamic breaking the camera free can be. —Zach Sharf
47. “In the Cut” (2003)
Jane Campion’s adaptation of Susanna Moore’s novel about a creative writing professor (Meg Ryan) who is both a suspect and a potential victim in a series of murders stands alongside Spike Lee’s “25th Hour” as one of the first truly great post-9/11 movies, though unlike Lee’s film it never takes 9/11 on as a subject. Instead, “In the Cut” uses its portrait of an almost catatonic protagonist drifting through New York in a daze as a metaphor for American culture at large, without losing sight of its obligations as an erotic thriller. Cinematographer Dion Beebe employs a highly impressionistic style to place us in the shoes of Ryan’s Frannie, creating a world filled with danger and sensuality that is expressed largely through light and color. When Frannie catches her first glimpse of the killer — who neither she nor we know is a killer yet — he’s obscured by shadow but outlined by red neon from behind that turns part of his white shirt a bit yellow-green. It’s a color scheme that will repeat throughout the film, with Beebe alternating between or juxtaposing red and green to evoke a persistent feeling of both sexual excitement and terrifying menace. In addition to his unique approach to color (which extends to a sepia-toned series of flashbacks), Beebe constantly blurs the edges of the screen to convey both Frannie’s numbed, limited point of view and the larger cultural numbness of a city and country still dealing with the psychic impact of 9/11. It’s a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a terrifying and enticing fairy tale for adults. —Jim Hemphill
46. “Road to Perdition” (2002)
Director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall’s second collaboration following their Oscar-winning work on “American Beauty” was not only wildly different from that film, it was wildly different from virtually every period gangster movie that had come before it. Translating the panels of Max Allan Collins’ graphic novel about the Irish Mafia of 1930s Chicago into moving images, Hall went for naturalistic realism as opposed to the extreme stylization of most modern attempts to revisit the cinematic language of “Little Caesar,” “Scarface,” and “Public Enemy.” The starkness of both the Depression setting and the psychological warfare of David Self’s screenplay find their visual corollary in Hall’s brutally stripped-down hard light, muted tones, limited depth of field, and dark backgrounds that threaten to swallow the characters whole; after decades of film noir, “Road to Perdition” achieved what one would have thought was impossible by making the style seem new again. —JH
45. “All that Breathes” (2022)
It took director Shaunak Sen a year of filming Nadeem and Saud — two brothers who dedicated their lives to rescuing the black kite birds of New Delhi — to discover the visual language of his film, the way the contemplative camera would mirror the brothers’ outlook and capture the simultaneity of life between not only the kite birds and humans but all the animals of the city’s toxic ecosystem. Yet knowing how the documentary should be shot was simply the blueprint. To execute it, Sen turned to one of the most fascinating cinematographers working today: German DoP Ben Bernhard, whose work with director Viktor Kossakovsky in filming the ocean (“Aquarela”) and animals (“Gunda”) has helped create and expand a new grammar for nonfiction film, and the results of his collaboration with Sen in India are some of the most striking, poetic, and thought-provoking images of 2022. —CO
44. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011)
An incredible use of long lens distinguishes this icy spy thriller — as does cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s gift for composition that, even when using a 200mm lens, somehow never feels like a visual gimmick. He used the compressed, voyeuristic feel of longer lenses to give the story a sense of unfolding drama, even when the dense plot left viewers baffled. Director Tomas Alfredson used Erwin Fieger’s large-format book of color photographs of 1960s London as the inspiration for the film’s period look, and like Lachman’s work on “Carol,” Van Hoytema perfectly mirrored the grain, color, and feel of the period format. The cinematographer’s work goes far beyond employing the right capture process in how he brings the nicotine-stained atmosphere of tweed-textured London to life. Inside the flatness of color and space, he finds incredible beauty and detail — that unique way of seeing makes Van Hoytema’s cinematography, from James Bond (“Spectre”) to Christopher Nolan’s last three films, like nothing we’ve ever seen before. —CO
43. “The Aviator” (2004)
Cinematographer Robert Richardson earned his second of three Oscars for Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He achieved a stylistic fusion of period lighting techniques, shooting Super 35mm using Panaflex Platinum cameras and Primo lenses and six different Kodak stocks. But what was unique about the visual strategy was how it digitally emulated Technicolor’s two-color (red and green) and three-strip processes (red, green, and blue), which characterized many of the Hollywood color films that Hughes produced. To achieve this ambitious technical feat, Richardson worked with three-time Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor/second unit director Rob Legato (“The Jungle Book, “Hugo,” “Titanic”) and Technicolor. They created a sophisticated DI with a customized look up table (LUT), applying what amounted to a digital filter to attain the two-color or three-color looks. —BD
42. “The White Ribbon” (2009)
Michael Haneke’s philosophical meditation on evil and what makes people susceptible to fascist ideologies marked a high point in his ongoing collaboration with cinematographer Christian Berger, whose black and white photography feels — paradoxically, given the movie’s period setting — more modern than a typical black and white film. Utilizing sharp contrasts and relying on natural light as much as possible, Berger creates a look that clearly and concisely expresses both the pastoral lyricism and merciless cruelty of Haneke’s story, often leaving the most harrowing incidents to exist outside the edges of the frame in the audience’s imagination. Following Roger Deakins’ lead on “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” Berger shot in color and then adjusted the gray scale in post, giving him greater breadth of possibilities than conventional black and white photography; since this allowed Berger to capture tones unavailable to black and white cinematographers of the past, “The White Ribbon” has an immediacy and contemporary feel to remind us that the horror we are watching unfold is every bit as possible today as it was in the early 20th-century Germany in which the film is set. —JH
41. “Skyfall” (2012)
James Bond and Roger Deakins might seem like a mismatched pairing. One lives in a world of exotic glamour and fantastical high-tech gadgetry, and the other works with the grounded principles of photography to evoke the emotion of realistic drama. Yet in the context of our fantasy franchise protagonists, Bond’s action-filled journeys are remarkably earthbound and set in a recognizable world, supplying just enough of a grounding for Deakins to do his thing. One of the joys of “Skyfall” is watching Deakins let loose and have some fun exploring the varied palette — from light to color and movement — of the film’s globetrotting set pieces. From the rich glow of the red casino to the neon billboard-lit glass skyscraper in Shanghai, the cinematographer’s striking images brought a sense of digital detail and realism to the film’s exotic beauty — which, in turn, served as a landmark film for the relatively new Arri Alexa camera in terms of proving to Hollywood it could handle big-budget eye candy. “Skyfall” was yet another example of why Deakins’ collaboration with production designer Dennis Gassner (“Blade Runner 2049,” “1917,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou”) remains one of the great visual joys of modern filmmaking, as the cinematographer’s lighting is built and incorporated into the film’s spaces to create a stunning, organic whole that is more eye-popping than any visual effect. And in a preview of the DoP’s future collaboration with director Sam Mendes on “1917,” we see Deakins — who insists on operating the camera himself to get both the feel and composition of what unfolds — using a wide variety of tools and techniques to bring a visceral exactness to each action-filled moment. —CO
40. “Babylon” (2022)
Damien Chazelle’s pop epic of Hollywood excess is as bold as movies get, and in his regular collaborator Linus Sandgren, Chazelle found the boldest possible cinematographer. Adopting a “more is more” philosophy, Sandgren reaches for extremes with as much audacity and passion as Margot Robbie’s crazed silent movie star — in every scene he ratchets the style up to 11, blasting his characters with light in the exteriors and drenching them in horrifying darkness for sequences like an all-time great set piece late in the film featuring a truly disturbing Tobey Maguire. The presentation of that Maguire character speaks to one of Sandgren’s great achievements here, which is his charting of the characters’ fortunes through light — when the charming but doomed denizens of “Babylon” are riding high, the soft light provides a glow so inviting it makes the film feel like it was shot in 3D. When things start to go wrong, so does the light, growing harsher and more unforgiving until it ceases to exist altogether in the film’s later scenes. Shooting on film, Sandgren pays tribute to and shatters Hollywood’s glamorous history — before he and Chazelle put it all back together again in a glorious climax. —JH
39. “John Wick: Chapter Two” (2017)
When “John Wick” director Chad Stahelski saw the trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s “Crimson Peak,” he was so struck by the depth of field and rich colors that he didn’t even wait to see the movie before calling cinematographer Dan Laustsen about shooting “John Wick: Chapter Two.” The “John Wick” movies Laustsen would go on to shoot (he has photographed every film in the series to date) look like action movies directed by Bernardo Bertolucci or Wong Kar-Wai. Filled with incredibly vivid colors, bold widescreen compositions that earn comparison with the best of Sergio Leone, and a Caravaggio-esque interplay between light and shadow that’s constantly shifting in harmony with the action choreography, “John Wick: Chapter Two” is a feast for the eyes in which the cinematography showcases and enhances the actors’ movements every bit as much as the camerawork in classic musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Band Wagon.” The movie’s greatest pleasure is its precision; Laustsen’s close collaboration with Stahelski and series production designer Kevin Kavanaugh yields a fully realized world in which no visual detail is extraneous and every shaft of light and splash of color serves an emotional purpose. Few action movies are this beautiful or this visceral. —JH
38. “Children of Men” (2006)
Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian masterpiece with cinematographer Emmanuel (Chivo) Lubezki was a documentary-style breakthrough in their celebrated collaboration, featuring a handheld camera and long tracking shots. Starring Clive Owen and set against the backdrop of a global infertility crisis in 2027, they achieved a bleak aesthetic with a muted color palette. Most memorable was the way light peeked through flares coming out of windows. Lubezki shot in Kodak 35mm with the Arricam LT camera and Zeiss Prime lenses to achieve a great sense of naturalism. The opening cafe bomb blast has become legendary: as the camera follows Owen onto the London street after he exits the cafe, he witnesses the shocking devastation. As he hurriedly makes his way onto the street, the camera suddenly becomes shaky. The sequence establishes the unpredictability and hopelessness that characterizes humanity’s plight. Then there’s the famous car chase scene, with the long take structured in three parts: inside the car with the group, the disruption of a fiery car blocking them, causing the group to flee in reverse, and the rebels being pulled over by a police car, allowing the group to escape. —BD
37. “The French Dispatch” (2021)
Cinematographer Robert Yeoman and director Wes Anderson reached a new creative peak with their eighth collaboration, a lively episodic recreation of stories from a fictional magazine. The varied nature of the tales enabled Yeoman to employ a variety of stylistic techniques — including moving between color and black-and-white and transitioning from one aspect ratio to another — while retaining the symmetrical, deep-focus compositions Anderson has always favored, and the wide array of styles feels as liberating for the viewer as it must have for Yeoman and Anderson. The movie is filled with stunning shots that involve combinations of whip-pans and dolly moves in which the camera must interact with the actors in a meticulously choreographed dance, and they’re often so elaborate and complex that the technical achievement itself is as responsible for the comedy as the writing and acting. The technical bravura extends to shots where it might not be as obvious to the audience, such as the many deep-focus compositions Yeoman had to shoot at a T8 to get the look Anderson wanted or a long dolly shot in which all the actors are frozen but some are extremely close to the camera while some are very far — a shot that placed huge demands on Yeoman’s first AC, Vincent Scotet. The crew’s massive efforts resulted in a film that never shows the strain, a comedy as charming and invigorating as the French New Wave masterpieces that influenced it. —JH
36. “The Green Knight” (2021)
David Lowery’s mystical, hallucinatory adaptation of the 14th-century Arthurian poem about slacker Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) risking his head to earn knighthood contained one of the boldest uses of color and composition in recent years by cinematographer Andrew Droz Palmero. This was appropriate given the disorienting physical and mental ordeal experienced by Sir Gawain. They found the perfect mix of geographical locations in Ireland. To achieve a sense of scale and depth, Palermo shot large format with the ARRI Alexa 65 with ARRI DNA and T-Type lenses (for most of the end sequence, where Gawain imagines a future that might’ve been). However, going against the typical desaturated look of medieval movies, Palermo went for a more colorful, modern visual design that achieved a touch of the surreal. Since indoor lighting in medieval castles would be dim, the cinematographer kept to single-source, single-direction lighting. One of the highlights is the final confrontation at the Green Chapel, which has a feverish look. —BD
35. “Dune” (2021)
Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser delivered on the spectacle of director Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi passion project. This was like a combination of David Lean (“Lawrence of Arabia”) and Andrei Tarkovsky (“Solaris”). Fraser conveyed the visually diverse world-building and its impact on Timothée Chalamet’s messianic journey as Paul Atreides. It was photographed in large format, primarily with the Alexa LF to convey the distinctive looks of the planets, especially the central desert planet of Arrakis, with its seductive beauty and power, which required rigorous modulation by the cinematographer in both composition and color. In addition, Fraser used the IMAX 65mm cameras for Paul’s surreal dreams and visions on Arrakis, which provided a more subjective approach. —BD
34. “Silence” (2016)
Mexican DP Rodrigo Prieto first joined forces with Martin Scorsese on “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but their collaboration reached new heights on “Silence.” When you watch the powerful religious/period drama, the distinct palette and stark imagery are striking, even for a Scorsese film, but not altogether surprising considering the careful planning that goes into each of his films. But Prieto created the film’s sculpted look under impossible conditions. Juggling rough locations under constantly changing and harsh weather conditions, Prieto somehow controls the elements by making fog, nature, the sea, and sunlight into the tools of his outdoor studio. —CO
33. “Roma” (2018)
Alfonso Cuarón made Oscar history as the first director to win the cinematography award, thanks to the unavailability of his go-to DP, the three-time Academy Award winner Emmanuel (Chivo) Lubezki. Cuarón created a new visual aesthetic, shooting in color with the Alexa 65 but then sculpting in black-and-white like a photo-realistic painter. He meticulously recreated the past through stream-of-consciousness recollections of his family, house, and neighborhood during the turbulent ’70s in Mexico City. Yet he chose to follow domestic worker Cleo (Best Actress nominee Yalitza Aparicio) with his roving camera. Cuarón collaborated with Technicolor on the aesthetically complex black-and-white finishing (using Autodesk Lustre and Flame). Together, they isolated areas of the frame and manipulated color and tonal values to achieve the precise monochromatic look the director desired. The conceit was shooting in sequence and placing us as objective observers in the narrative flow through the use of horizontal pans inside the house and on the rooftop and then tracking shots in the neighborhood outside. —BD
32. “The Neon Demon” (2016)
Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s visual concept of a colorful nightmare born out of the allure of fashion-magazine beauty is one of those ideas that sounds exciting and cool but not so easy to pull off. Thankfully, cinematographer Natasha Braier — one of the most inventive, resourceful, and fearless DoPs working today — not only created the elegant sheen of high-priced fashion photography with a noirish undercurrent, but she did so shooting on multiple locations and within the confines of a rapid-paced, barebones $5 million shoot. Painting almost entirely with color and shadow, Brairer transforms recognizable Los Angeles into a stunning hellscape. —CO
31. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004)
When we talk about the magic of “Eternal Sunshine,” it is often about the chocolate-and-peanut butter-like combination of writer Charlie Kaufman’s inventive narrative insanity and director Michel Gondry’s ephemeral visual poetry. However, it’s Ellen Kuras’ cinematography that serves as the glue holding the two together. On a very practical level, Kuras’ lighting serves as vital exposition — clearly delineating the different dimensions and supplying inventive transitions — that allows the complex science fiction device to melt into the background and the metaphysical poetry to rise to the top. In a film about the erasing of memories, the lighting itself has a fragility in its washed-out beauty that creates a visual texture. The result not only mirrors the film’s themes, it becomes the primary storytelling device. Kuras creates a film that’s intimate and otherworldly at once. —CO
30. “Suspiria” (2018)
The original “Suspiria” is not only one of the best uses of saturated color in the history of horror but in all of cinema. What’s fascinating about director Luca Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s remake is how they went in the opposite direction with their drab Cold War setting to create something that was just as pictorially alive. In the digital era, this type of desaturated movie is often accomplished with a turn of the dial in post, crushing the life and soul of the image. That’s not “Suspiria.” The film’s narrow palette is a tour de force of exquisitely sculpted cinematography — vivid, almost opulent imagery, with rich layer piled upon rich layer: the porcelain skin tone, the symphony of muted colors, the delicate winter light. All of that seamlessly transitions into alternate dimensions, like the shadowy, undefined space in the corridors, the theatricality of the Volk performance, the ethereal nightmares and… well, that ending. Mukdeeprom perfectly captures the essence of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus — whose 1970s work with the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder embodied the spirit of the era Guadagnino was trying to channel — but makes it his own. —CO
29. “Mulholland Drive” (2001)
When cinematographer Peter Deming reunited with his “Lost Highway” director David Lynch for “Mulholland Drive,” he thought he was shooting a pilot for a TV series along the lines of Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” Thanks to the network’s disdain for what Lynch delivered, the pilot turned into a theatrical release after Lynch came up with a new final act that transformed the Hollywood noir into an endlessly fascinating and ultimately unsolvable puzzle film. Juxtaposing sunlight that both blinds and entrances the city’s denizens with milky black evenings that traverse L.A.’s squalid downtown apartments and its toniest parties in the Hollywood Hills, Deming uses light as a visual corollary for Lynch’s thematic preoccupations and conveys the meaning that the purposefully impenetrable screenplay obfuscates. Sometimes actors in the same scene are lit completely differently to reflect their experiences, as in an exchange between Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Elena Harring) in which the light hitting Betty is natural and the light on Rita is an unnatural soft light from above to indicate her dream state. When the dream turns into a nightmare in the film’s harrowing final act, Deming takes “Mulholland Drive” straight into horror film territory, drenching his characters in shadows that would make Jacques Tourneur green with envy. —JH
28. “Invisible Life” (2019)
Year after year, French cinematographer Hélène Louvart — especially through her work with directors such as Alice Rohrwacher and Eliza Hittman — has produced some of the most textural, intimate and story-driven cinematography seen on the international film festival circuit. With “Invisible Life,” the cinematographer managed to produce the type of beautiful imagery that epitomizes her talent. This film is grounded in the lush nightlife and tropical landscape of Rio, which Louvart is able to organically build off to incorporate the film’s magical elements. Through an incredible use of anamorphic lenses, backlight, and color saturation, the evening scenes come alive with images that match the vibrancy of the music. Through hazy contrasts, the cast’s skin radiates — often framed by the perfect highlight — to project an inner life and spirit that underlines the subtleties of performance and story. A luminous film in every sense of the word. —CO
27. “Interstellar” (2014)
Director Christopher Nolan’s first collaboration with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema is a science fiction epic firmly rooted in authenticity — whether or not it’s all actually possible, it feels real, and that’s what motivated Nolan and van Hoytema’s choices when finding a style. Van Hoytema shot a little over an hour of the film’s 170 minutes in 15-perf 65mm IMAX, shooting the remaining material in 35mm anamorphic and 8-perf VistaVision. What’s interesting about this choice is not the way that van Hoytema uses the IMAX format for the movie’s scenes of spectacle — though those are appropriately awe-inspiring — but the way in which he applies it to the movie’s more intimate moments, taking advantage of the depth, clarity, and size of IMAX to create striking portraiture that draws the audience into the emotional story of parents and children. The desire to forge that connection between the viewer and the characters led to other innovations, like the creation of a rig that would attach IMAX cameras to the actors via a system of cables and suspended body rigs — a sort of IMAX GoPro — and Nolan and van Hoytema strove to intensify the audience-character connection via sets and camerawork that would really illustrate the claustrophobia of being stuck on a spaceship for long periods of time. To that end, van Hoytema worked with Panavision wizard Dan Sasaki to build custom lenses that would allow him to get the shots he needed on the cramped spaceship sets, which were purposefully designed so that the walls wouldn’t move or fly out. (Sasaki was also called upon to create lenses that would flare differently than typical anamorphics — in van Hoytema’s words, “warmer and fluffier.”) The end result is a science fiction classic of profound emotional power and immediacy. —JH
26. “Moonlight” (2016)
There’s an inherent visual tension to the look of Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.” Set in the harsh realities of Liberty City, an impoverished section of Miami where Jenkins and co-writer Tarell McCraney grew up, the sun-drenched neighborhood is filled with bright pastel colors and lush, tropical trees and grass. What Jenkins has called a “beautiful nightmare” is brought to life in cinematographer James Laxton’s high contrast lighting design, in which you can feel the hot Miami sun glisten on the characters’ faces as it reveals rich colors from the mid-tones and gives the movie a dreamlike quality. Not only do Jenkins and Laxton circumvent the documentary-like realism we’ve come to expect from an American indie tackling social issues, but they also defy the odds of low-budget filmmaking to bring an extremely high level of craft to this unlikely Oscar winner. —CO
25. “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015)
“Mad Max: Fury Road,” dreamed up on an airplane and realized by a 70-year-old director 35 years after his feature debut with the original “Mad Max,” does not follow any formula that a studio executive would recognize. To shoot his vision of a non-stop action movie, “a silent movie with sound,” George Miller pulled great Australian cinematographer John Seale out of retirement for this Oscar-nominated achievement. They followed some Western tropes, substituting wheels for horses and pitting adversaries against each other in an endless desert, but zagged away from imitative post-apocalyptic cliches by saturating the color palette and avoiding the junkyard look of other dystopian landscapes. Two stunning sequences involve digital enhancement. One is the massive dust storm that envelops the swarm of warring vehicles, which get lost in a swirling dreamy CGI haze. The other is out on the wide desert (shot in Namibia) on an eery blue night with shining stars. Like ’40s and ’50s westerns, they shot it day for night, with light glistening on hair, skin and eyes. —Anne Thompson
24. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019)
The best films are always, somehow, about the act of looking; but cinematographer Claire Mathon’s work in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” doesn’t make the top spot of Katie Mitchell’s “The Fifty Greatest Films EVER MADE” or the top 25 of this list simply by playing with perspective. Mathon’s long takes and careful framing establish the power dynamics between painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her subject, the soon-to-be-married Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), then gracefully breaks those dynamics apart. The concentrated use of color, camera movement as deliberate and as expressive as a brushstroke, and the play of light, shadow, and natural flame all work together to create an environment that is more musically alive than even the lushest romantic score. The film doesn’t really need one. It is all of their looking that leads to Marianne and Héloïse to know and love each other in a way that can be evoked (but never fully captured) by the art of the film’s 18th-century setting. But Mathon’s camera captures it. The visuals of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” look deceptively simple, if beautiful, but there are myriad choices and techniques positioning the audience into exactly the right pose to see it. —SS
23. “Hero” (2002)
Director Zhang Yimou quite literally elevates the wuxia film, as some of the biggest martial art stars in the world are virtually weightless in some of the most gorgeous fight scenes committed to film. Yimou’s direction is clean, allowing for a pure appreciation of the artistry of the fights, not to mention the way they’re incorporated into their natural backdrops — all of which are filmed with vivid colors by War Kong-wai’s regular DP Christopher Doyle. The film explodes with candy-colored visuals that are a pure joy to take in. —CO
22. “The Beguiled”
Director Sofia Coppola’s Southern Gothic Civil War-era world is wrapped in a thick, hazy atmosphere that brings us inside the interior of a group of women cut off from the rest of the world during wartime. The porcelain skin, the gauzy gray exterior dripping with humidity, the warmth of the candlelight tapering off into celluloid black, the way natural light enters the house and glistens on Colin Farrell’s skin — we could go on and on. Philippe Le Sourd’s lighting creates textures you can practically feel. Combined with his and Coppola’s use of the camera, a sexually charged hyperreality develops beneath the women’s genteel exterior. —CO
21. “Nope” (2022)
With “Nope,” Jordan Peele made his version of a big-budget UFO blockbuster from the Black perspective — in IMAX, no less. It’s basically a cautionary horror film about our addiction to spectacle that also delivers all the cinematic goods we expect from the type of alluring object it’s warning us about. It’s no surprise that Peele chose Hoyte van Hoytema as his cinematographer; van Hoytema is the master of large format and shooting on film, thanks to his innovative collaboration with Christopher Nolan (“Interstellar,” “Dunkirk,” “Tenet,” and the upcoming “Oppenheimer”). Naturally, van Hoytema was in an experimental mood with “Nope.” He shot with large format IMAX cameras for the immersive action along with Panavision System 65 cameras for the rest (with Kodak supplying 65mm film for both). He took the bulky camera on his shoulder and on helicopters to achieve a unique sense of grandeur and mounting terror. Each attack was patterned after a different genre: sci-fi, horror, disaster film, and Western. However, van Hoytema’s greatest innovation was devising a technique for shooting large format day-for-night for more realistic nighttime vision. This consisted of shooting each sequence on an Arri Alexa 65 customized to shoot infrared pointing vertically in perfect alignment with a Panavision System 65 camera, which was on a horizontal axis. The footage was then blended in perfect synchronization. —BD
20. “West Side Story” (2021)
Janusz Kaminski and Steven Spielberg’s musical extravaganza is more than a reimagining of Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ 1961 original; it’s a celebration of the entire art form of Broadway musicals, with Kaminski’s vibrant photography evoking the glamour and beauty he always associated with the form as an immigrant enthralled by American culture. Embracing the potential for melodramatic excess inherent in the story, Kaminski creates a rapturous sense of glossy romanticism in every frame, placing his characters in theatrical pools of light and making the most of production design and costumes that span the entire color wheel. An early interaction between Maria, her brother Bernardo, and Bernardo’s girlfriend Anita could have been a standard dialogue scene, but by blocking the actors amidst brightly colored fabrics hanging in the apartment and utilizing stained glass as a design element, Kaminski and Spielberg allow for a vibrant interplay of light, shadow, and movement. When the movie really cuts loose with its ambitious and elaborately choreographed dance numbers, Kaminski goes even further, drenching his actors in light that gives them and their surroundings an almost magical quality on par with the finest musicals of MGM’s heyday. —JH
19. “Ida”
Black-and-white photography has been, for the whole of the 21st century, a deliberate artistic choice. But it’s rare for that choice to be as essential to the telling of a film’s story as it is in “Ida.” Pawel Pawlikoski’s film follows a young Polish nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) who, on the precipice of taking her holy orders, peeks her veiled head out from the cloister to discover hidden truths about who her family was and the world she’s going to foreswear. And the brutal, breathtaking power of the film is that the emotional weight of those truths isn’t ever said so much as sensed through the visuals composed by co-cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal. The black and white plunges the viewer into a chill atmosphere of deliberate silence and casual despair that is startlingly beautiful, one where the evidence of World War II’s destruction is just as clear as the loam and the roots reclaiming their place in nature. Lenczewski and Zal’s use of light and shadow are so sharp they can pierce armor, and that alone would make “Ida” a gorgeously romantic telling of a tragic story. What makes the film’s cinematography great, though, is the way Lenczewski and Zal’s frames emphasize how fragile the worlds we make are, through the way light coming through a window hits a bathtub just slightly wrong or the way a statue of Jesus looks like so much wood while being carried through the snow. As the camera lingers on cracked concrete and bare facades, the film’s imagery expresses the latent damage that is everywhere around Ida, with which she must reckon in order to have any shot at peace. —SS
18. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019)
Quentin Tarantino reunited with favored cinematographer Robert Richardson for his affectionate, frequently hilarious ode to the transition between the old studio era and the New Hollywood of the 1970s, and both filmmakers were clearly invigorated by the possibilities the premise offered. In telling the story of fading star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), his stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and their eventual intersection with real-life Hollywood icon Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Richardson was given free rein to recreate TV westerns, Italian exploitation films, pop music dance shows, weekly procedurals, John Sturges-esque war films, and a whole lot more — while also taking a detour for some dusty “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”-inspired horror on a side trip to visit the Manson Family at Spahn Ranch. The variety of styles and traditions being celebrated is dizzying yet it all feels of a piece, unified by Richardson and Tarantino’s dedication to classical composition and camera movement in the form of elegant widescreen compositions and gliding crane and dolly shots. —JH
17. “Mr. Turner” (2014)
It’s quite possible that no painter created more jaw-dropping and inspiring images using sunlight than the 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner. The idea of making a biopic about the famed painter in which the film would mirror the light of his famous landscapes seemed like an experiment fated to end poorly — especially for a director like Mike Leigh, whose previous works mostly captured gritty realness. That is underestimating the often unheralded talents of British DP Dick Pope, one of the more technically proficient cinematographers working today. Pope traveled to Turner’s home of Margate to find the light that inspired the painter, then built a production schedule around getting the light at the right time of day. Even for interiors, he refused to do CGI out the windows and used actual oil paints as his reference in creating his color palette. The biggest compliment one can pay the film is that it manages to capture the essence of Turner’s work. —CO
16. “Gravity” (2013)
Since production on “Gravity” commenced almost a decade ago, technology has significantly advanced, while virtual cinema workflows have become far more established. And yet when pushed blindly into the uncharted territory of creating with virtual cameras and light, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki not only cracked the code; he produced a level of zero-G artistry that no one has approached since. Through his work with Terrence Malick on “Tree of Life” and “New World,” it is easy to think of the cinematographer as being his generation’s master of instinctual filmmaking — his work with natural light and virtuoso improvisational camerawork elevated and freed Malick’s poetic cinema is such exciting ways. Yet somehow on “Gravity,” Lubezki was able to manufacture the beauty of natural light with the perfect cocktail of on-stage cinema lights and in-computer virtual lighting. And while pioneering not-yet-mastered computer-generate tools, he somehow produced the same type of jaw-dropping long-take camera movements that he accomplished on “Children of Men” and later “Birdman.” Lubezki’s work on “Tree of Life” and “Gravity” demonstrate the full potential of the two very different directions the cinema of today is headed. —CO
15. “Carol” (2015)
Director Todd Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman’s long-standing professional relationship — dating back to 2002’s “Far From Heaven” — is a prodigious and profound one, but 2015’s stirring romance “Carol” is the best distillation of their shared powers yet. Continually preoccupied with time and place and possessing a real knack for portraying period settings through detail, Lachman’s lighting is his most warm yet, conveying the intimacy of the spaces in which Carol (Cate Blanchett) and Therese (Rooney Mara) meet and, more often, hide together. Few romances look this daringly personal, begging the audience to come further inside, while also making it plain that they’re somehow intruding. Bolstered by luminous closeups and teasing peeks toward far-off promises, Lachman’s lensing is as lush as it gets and just as heartbreaking. —Kate Erbland
14. “The Handmaiden” (2016)
Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon and Park Chan-wook have collaborated since 2003 (“Old Boy”) to create some of the most unique cinematic works of the century, but it’s with “The Handmaiden” that Chung’s work is allowed to really shine. His camera always moves with a divine sense of purpose — Park knows how to wring any space for every ounce of its potential drama — but Chung’s lighting has never been more measured or exact. The night scenes are coated in a luminous gray haze that haunts the estate with the ghosts of Lady Hideko’s discarded relatives, and the sex scenes are soaked in a supple warmth that actively resists the blankness of pornography; there’s an honesty to these images that lets Park shoot a 69 while still keeping it 100. —David Ehrlich
13. “A Star Is Born” (2018)
In director, co-writer, and star Bradley Cooper’s 2018 version of one of Hollywood’s favorite stories about itself, Matty Libatique keeps the camera on stage with rising star Ally (Lady Gaga) to convey her experience of going from singing in small clubs to the biggest arenas in the world. With an assist from ace Steadicam operator Scott Sakamoto, Libatique’s restless camera goes for extreme subjectivity in both the concert sequences and the intimate moments depicting the tragic love story between Ally and Jackson Maine (Cooper). As the power balance in the relationship shifts from Jackson to Ally, the colors grow more vivid to reflect Ally’s intoxication with fame, only to shift to white light in her final scene to bring her back to earth. Throughout the film, Libatique gives Ally and Jackson their own distinct visual language, applying specific lenses, lighting techniques, and filtration to each character that then enters the other character’s world when they’re together as one person or another is given greater dramatic weight. It’s a master class in visual storytelling. —JH
12. “Miami Vice” (2006)
Working with cinematographers Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron, director Michael Mann broke new ground in his 2004 thriller “Collateral,” one of the first major studio films to utilize digital capture. It wasn’t just shooting digitally that made “Collateral” special; it was the fact that Mann embraced digital’s properties and maximized their potential. Instead of merely trying to replicate a film look, Mann used digital to do what film couldn’t, capturing sharply detailed night exteriors in which the L.A. landscape seemed to stretch into infinity. When Mann and Beebe reunited two years later for “Miami Vice,” they took the experiments of “Collateral” to a whole new level. The deep-focus night photography is more detailed and dynamic than ever, but where “Miami Vice” sets itself apart is in the daytime scenes, where the digital sensor creates a palpable sensation of light hitting the actors and landscapes with an impact that’s both sensual and brutal, somehow hyperreal and oddly poetic at the same time. (Ironically, some of what look like the simplest moments required the most artificial light, as Beebe had to roast his actors to balance the extreme sunlight flooding into the interiors from outside — so much for the theory that digital requires less light.) Ultimately, the true greatness of “Miami Vice” lies in the way that Beebe and Mann use both the aesthetic qualities of digital and its practical applications in terms of more flexible camera placement to create a purely visceral, immediate experience; the anxiety and adrenaline racing through the veins of the undercover cops at the film’s center are clear in every razor-sharp, dreamlike image. —JH
11. “Blade Runner 2049” (2017)
What Roger Deakins did for the past with “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” he does for the future in “Blade Runner 2049,” finding the precise visual language for the period he’s trying to convey. When you try to take apart the visual elements of the film — the visual effects, the composited backdrops, the holograms — it might seem reasonable to ask where Deakins’ cinematography stops and the digital wizardry begins. But even looking at “Blade Runner 2049” that way is to misunderstand Deakins’ contribution or the nature of his collaboration with director Denis Villeneuve. After the director figured out the rules of this world, he began working with his great cinematographer to determine how they would visually build it. Beyond the jaw-dropping and inspired light and color — orange sulfur haze, silver winter light, the amorphous liquid light of Jared Leto’s lair, the endless little pockets of light that give depth to vast noir exteriors — this was a film that leaned heavily on Deakins’ particular skill set. Thanks to his exhaustive pre-planning and his control, you can’t really separate the visual effects from the rest of the imagery. Everything is perfectly unified in a world that — not unlike Ridley Scott and Jordan Cronenweth’s masterful work in the original “Blade Runner” — is built and defined by light. Deakins’ work on “Blade Runner” is a roadmap to Hollywood, demonstrating how effective visual effects can be when a cinematographer is involved from conception to composite to color correction. —CO
10. “Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2” (2003-4)
Robert Richardson and Quentin Tarantino were still feeling each other out in this their first collaboration, “Jackie Brown,” which was — at least from a cinematography standpoint — the director’s most ambitious movie. Cinematically, Tarantino was leaving the confines of Los Angeles for the first time to fully enter a visual world comprised of a wide array of Western and martial arts influences. Richardson’s use of color, light, and movement elevated each set piece’s genre references into a bold, expressionistic brand of personal cinema. From the vigor of the camera to the punch of the snap-zooms to the fight choreography, Richardson dialed into Tarantino’s playful, violent sense of movement and delivered with visceral precision and oodles of personality. Starting with “Kill Bill,” Richardson became the principal vessel for Tarantino to create worlds that were both uniquely his own and matches for the stylistic beauty of the work that led him to become a filmmaker in the first place. —CO
9. “Mother of George” (2013)
With “Selma” and “Arrival,” Bradford Young established himself as one of Hollywood’s elite cinematographers. Not that long ago, though, Young was the very best cameraman working in independent film. His Sundance films, including “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” and “Pariah,” were visually bold yet classically beautiful and unified in their look — a rare combination for low-budget filmmaking. There is no better example than Andrew Dosunmu’s “Mother of George,” a high-contrast lighting scheme that allows darkness to fill the frame and creates an ominous urban landscape while at the same having a rich color palette and presenting characters with great warmth and reverence. Young doesn’t tip-toe through lighting and exposing darker skin tones in a story of a Nigerian couple living in Brooklyn but rather sculpts their faces with a strong directional light that reflects with majesty. —CO
8. “The Immigrant” (2014)
No film in recent memory has leaned into verisimilitude to produce such a painterly and vast emotional landscape. Cinematographer Darius Khondji captures the experience of director James Gray’s grandmother immigrating from Poland (Gray’s script is based on journals) by finding the poetic in the realism of shooting in cramp spaces of the Lower East Side tenements and mirroring the muted colors and under-exposed light of 1920s gas lamp interiors. Instead of simply problem-solving for limitations — like how to shoot widescreen anamorphic without knocking down a wall — Khondji finds incredible compositional complexity in what is obscured, etching out details in the dark browns, channeling the works of the great 19th-century painters, the artful muted colors of the Lumière Autochromes, and Gordon Willis’ “Godfather” cinematography. The film’s texture is evocative and rich from under-exposure and the mix of atmosphere and light without feeling forced or undercutting the harsher realities of the story. —CO
7. “House of Flying Daggers” (2004)
“House of Flying Daggers,” like its wuxia cousin “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and director Yimou Zhang’s own “Hero,” operates on a heightened visual logic. The color is so ornately organized and the landscapes are laid out with such painterly emotion and the action is so fluid and flowing that the elegance of the imagery becomes a kind of play in and of itself. But within the film’s jaw-dropping action sequences (and the stillnesses that are equally essential to them), cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao turns the movement of the camera or the sudden reveal of a new tableau into its own kind of delight. Zhao’s alternating use of slow or fast time, shot scale, and a balanced depth of frame that seems to beckon the audience inwards all make the film’s visuals a poetic meter as much as a means of conveying story information. Even the very 2004 computer-generated additions, the flurry of daggers in a bamboo forest (or nuts in a high-class brothel), feel at home in this heightened world, where the blind can see the most clearly and nothing is more exquisite than a splash of blood on the snow. —SS
6. “There Will Be Blood” (2007)
One always gets the sense that Robert Elswit and Paul Thomas Anderson learn from each other during the process of making a film together, not just how to lens something, but where to look, what to see, and what not to see. Elswit has long proven himself able to do anything, from blockbusters of the “Mission: Impossible” stripe to gonzo period comedies like “Inherent Vice,” but his sharpness always marks his work. And the darkness, too, rising most masterfully (and monstrously) in Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece, “There Will Be Blood.” An intimate character drama writ large, Elswit’s camera is just as comfortable capturing a glistening, enraged Daniel Day-Lewis as it is a sweeping vista of American West promise. The darkness glows, and it consumes. —KE
5. “Cold War” (2018)
In many ways, “Cold War” is a better showcase for cinematographer Lukasz Zal than “Ida,” the previous black-and-white film he shot for director Pawel Pawlikowski, which earned him a co-cinematography Oscar nomination. For “Cold War,” Pawlikowski and Zal dial up the contrast while elevating the camera so it can dig deeper into evocative spaces. The film also came with months of prep, during which the collaborators carefully designed longer shots so that the visual storytelling is boiled down to its essentials: Every movement is a dramatic storytelling beat, while Zal’s precise lighting and use of compositional depth emphasize even the smallest gestures to give them profound implications, right down to the tragic finish. —CO
4. “Far From Heaven” (2002)
Todd Haynes has thrown cinematographer Ed Lachman some difficult challenges over the course of their collaborations, but nothing tops their attempts to mirror the iconic imagery of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas (“All That Heaven Allows”) — which were captured by the great Russell Metty on the Universal soundstage using three-strip Technicolor — while shooting on location in New Jersey. Lachman, a technical wizard who does his homework, somehow nailed the look of an overhead grid light scheme (despite working with 10-foot domestic ceilings), a dazzling saturated color palette (despite the limitation of 2002 film stock), and even found a way to control the sun to give the exteriors a backlot feel. Lachman — the rare DP who found his way to film via fine arts — isn’t simply a photographic chameleon but an artist. As with Sirk, the surface beauty serves as a form of repression with frames that literally imprison the characters battling racism, sexism, and homophobia, while painting their emotional states with jaw-dropping color schemes. If the experiment of “Far From Heaven” was to discover if the heightened emotional state of ’50s style melodrama could still work on a modern audience, the answer came back as a resounding “Yes!” But only if Lachman’s shooting it. —CO
3. “In the Mood for Love” (2000)
Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee Ping Bing, and Pun-Leung Kwan all share a cinematography credit on “In the Mood for Love,” Wong Kar-Wai’s painfully elegant story of two people who are drawn together once they realize that their spouses are having an affair. But because the film is so deliberate in its use of locations, compositions, and camera angles, it’s not only impossible to pick out who shot which scenes but besides the point. Without becoming repetitive, the imagery creates a rhythm to the characters’ lives that gives us a sense of their day-to-day and the magnetic pull, of love itself perhaps, that slowly draws them together. The sense of the characters’ relationships, obligations, and even their take-out habits are continually reinforced through the DP’s careful framing, trapping Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung within some overarching geometric framework; yet they themselves are what the camera always draws our focus to, the point that pops the most inside of each frame’s beautifully composed and sumptuously colored. For a film that was shot somewhat improvisationally over the course of 15 months, there’s an overwhelming sense of design to the look of “In the Mood for Love.” Every texture, every color, every gorgeously dense composition — to say nothing of how the tendrils of cigarette smoke suggest the ache of time passing — in every shot is composed with the goal of getting the audience to yearn for the protagonists to kiss. In every single shot, you want it. And of course, the beauty of “In the Mood for Love” is that in every single shot, they don’t. —SS
1. TIE “The Tree of Life” (2011)
A visual poem told with light. Whereas “The New World” found cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki adding an important new layer to Terence Malick’s language, “Tree” is where the director convinces his DP to let loose and react to the moment and light in real-time. There is always an element of spirituality to Malick’s work, along with an awareness that human existence is a spec of dusk in the vast span of the universe. It’s a theme blatantly explored in this film — including cutaways to scenes involving the creation of the universe — but it’s best expressed in the way Lubezki chases the light and creates portraits of a family in an endless struggle between life and death. The approach to imagery is not new for Malick, but the virtuoso camerawork brings his fixation on the ache of being alive to profound new heights. —CO
1. TIE “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007) | |||||
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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 | 1 | 26 | https://www.verywellmind.com/what-your-favorite-movie-says-about-your-personality-8639987 | en | What Your Favorite Movie Says About Your Personality | [
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] | 2024-04-29T15:09:35.571000-04:00 | Whether you're extroverted, open to experiences, or agreeable, your movie preferences can say a lot about who you are. Learn more here. | en | /favicon.ico | Verywell Mind | https://www.verywellmind.com/what-your-favorite-movie-says-about-your-personality-8639987 | Movies are one of the most popular forms of entertainment, so it may be no surprise that your favorite genre can reveal something about who you are. While it's certainly not the only thing that determines what movies you watch, your personality and other traits can go a long way toward explaining your preferences.
Throughout this article, I've dug into available research on personality and the movies to explore some of the reasoning behind why certain people like comedy, sci-fi, horror, or other genres. This is primarily based on the Big Five Personality Test traits.
While there is certainly more research to be done, as a media psychologist I've shared my insights to give you an idea of what people will prefer when they decide to pick out a movie. Let’s see what your movie preferences say about you!
Horror
Horror is among the most studied genres in psychology, so we have a pretty good idea of who likes movies, such as Get Out, The Shining, and Saw.
Horror fans tend to be more neurotic, less agreeable, and less extroverted, so people who are more anxious but less outgoing and compliant like this genre. Perhaps people who are more anxious like horror movies because they can experience them in the relative safety of a movie theater or their homes.
In addition, horror fans tend to be high sensation seekers with lower empathy, so they enjoy watching things that will get a rise out of them and are less bothered by scenes of violence because they don’t identify with the on-screen victims.
For instance, when Jack Nicholson’s character comes after his wife with an axe in The Shining, people who love horror will be especially thrilled but will also be less threatened by his actions. Not surprisingly, many people who like horror the most are men.
Romance
People who like romance movies, like Titanic, The Notebook, and Pride and Prejudice, are extroverted, agreeable, and not particularly open to experiences. That is, they’re outgoing and easy to like, but don’t tend to be receptive to a variety of experiences or situations.
People who gravitate toward romantic movies also tend to like their movie-going experiences to be hedonic, or pleasurable, in nature so they don’t have to think too hard. For example, people who swoon when Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) draws Rose (Kate Winslet) in Titanic, may especially like this scene for its undemanding but sensual nature.
Many fans of romance can be said to have a warm and understanding nature, something that seems to be borne out by the type of movies they prefer.
Drama
Drama films are a broad category, but movies like The Shawshank Redemption, May December, and Good Will Hunting all have deep themes that make us think. People who like drama tend to be agreeable and extroverted, so they’re likable people who tend to be amenable to a variety of ideas.
So whether they are witnessing Will (Matt Damon) ask a guy “How do you like them apples?” in response to getting a girl’s number in Good Will Hunting or seeing the difficulty Andy (Tim Robbins) has in prison in The Shawshank Redemption, they are willing to go with it and see where the scenario leads them.
People who appreciate drama also like to have a eudaimonic, or meaningful, experience with movies. They don’t just watch movies for pleasure but for feelings of sympathy and warmth. They want to watch movies to understand others and think about the human experience.
Comedy
Comedies, including Legally Blond, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Elf, attract people who tend to be agreeable and have low openness to experience. So people who are fans of comedy may be amenable to the ideas presented in these movies but aren’t especially open to engaging with challenging situations.
Most importantly, perhaps, for comedy lovers is an enjoyment of hedonism. Comedy movies have it in abundance and watching, for instance, Buddy (Will Ferrell) eat spaghetti and syrup or throw snowballs at a bunch of bullies in Elf requires the pure enjoyment of pleasure.
Animation
While animation is a category that’s often associated with children, it draws people from across the age and gender spectrum. People who are high in agreeableness tend to like animated films because they value close family ties.
People who love animation also tend to be more neurotic. The reason for this could be similar to the reason people who like horror movies are more neurotic: anxious people like experiencing new things in a safe environment like a movie theater. But people who like animation may be more empathetic than those who like horror movies, making animation easier for these individuals to take.
For example, in Inside Out when Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley’s (Kaitlyn Dias) imaginary friend, fades out of existence, people who like animation may feel very badly for Bing Bong. At the same time, though, they likely appreciate the fact that they got to experience this poignant moment in the safety of a movie theater.
The Classics
Classic films are less explored in psychology research about movies and personality. In fact, there’s very little literature about them. But there’s been just enough to at least claim that people who appreciate classics, like Some Like it Hot, Casablanca, and Gone with the Wind, score high on openness to experience. So these are likely creative people who like to be involved with cognitively challenging genres.
It's also probably safe to say that people who like classics love eudaimonic movies. That is, they are looking for movies that make them think. For instance, Gone with the Wind has a variety of topics that fans could ruminate on, including comparing and contrasting the choices characters in the movie make with the choices we’d make today.
Science Fiction
Science fiction, such as Blade Runner, The Martian, Interstellar, and Arrival, can offer incredible takes on where we’re headed as a species. The people who love these movies tend to be open to experiences. As a result, it’s no wonder that these individuals enjoy both the intellectual stimulation and the aesthetic experiences provided by these movies.
For example, in Blade Runner, people may enjoy both the intellectual work of trying to decode what’s going on with Harrison Ford’s character and the beautiful aesthetics of the strange city he inhabits.
People who like sci-fi also are high sensation seekers, which is no surprise. If you think of all the incredible things you can see in a sci-fi movie, many of which you can’t see in real life, it makes sense that sensation seekers would gravitate to this genre.
Action/Adventure
Action/adventure is the second-most studied genre after horror, and action/adventure fans have some things in common with horror fans. Particularly, people who gravitate to action/adventure movies, like the James Bond franchise, the Indiana Jones movies, and the Avengers franchise, tend to be high sensation seekers and male, just like those who love horror.
However, there are differences, too. For example, people who love action/adventure are low in neuroticism, so they don’t tend to be very anxious. They also tend to seek films out for affiliative or aggressive uses. For example, in The Avengers when the final battle of New York happens, many action/adventure fans are bound to get a thrill. For some, this may have to do with their ability to enjoy this action with their friends and meet interpersonal goals; for others, this may help them release aggression through the film.
Fantasy
Fantasy, exemplified by films like The Princess Bride, the Harry Potter series, and the Lord of the Rings franchise, is a lot like science fiction. It tells incredible stories about fantastical people. But in this case, the science is replaced by magic.
Like sci-fi fans, fantasy fans tend to be high sensation seekers who are open to experiences. As a result, when Frodo (Elijah Wood) and his friends seek out friends at Rivendell in the Lord of the Rings franchise or Harry (Daniel Radcliff) finally casts his first spell in the Harry Potter series, people who love fantasy are riveted. Fantasy fans are also lower in extraversion, so these individuals tend to be imaginative, reflective people who are interested in many things but aren’t necessarily outgoing.
Sports movies
Finally, we have sports movies, such as Creed, Moneyball, and King Richard, which attract people who are lower on openness to experience and neuroticism, and higher on conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness. So people who love sports films, are not anxious but also don’t crave a lot of variety or stimulation. They’re also outgoing, affable, and tend to be more responsible.
These associations, outside of agreeableness, tend to mirror the relationship between people who have these traits and like physical activity. So, for example, it would seem that whether a fan is watching Creed to see boxing or participating in a boxing class, these individuals are scratching a similar itch.
Keep in Mind
It’s worth remembering that though we present these movies as distinct categories, there’s a lot of overlap, between sci-fi and fantasy, say, or between horror and action. Still, although this rundown doesn’t account for all the reasons we like specific categories of movies, it gives us a great start to recognize who likes which genres. Perhaps it'll even help you pick your next movie. | ||||
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] | 2019-02-14T13:12:30-05:00 | Check out 10+ outstanding Common Application example essays, including an analysis of why they're winning applications. | en | https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/527cc9ffe4b06105448def23/a5c36f00-dc59-4a88-9c91-179850233dcc/favicon.ico?format=100w | College Essay Guy | Get Inspired | https://www.collegeessayguy.com/blog/common-app-essay-examples | If you’re working on your college application, the Common Application prompts are in your future.
Even if you aren’t using the Common App, many schools require you to answer some version of the question “Who are you, and what do you value?”
Having helped thousands of students answer this question, I thought it would help to share some of my favorite Common App essay examples.
But first..
What is the Common Application?
The Common App is the most popular online system used by colleges and universities to help students apply to their college.
Hundreds of colleges and universities accept the Common App, and using it can save you a ton of time. Why? The essay you write for the Common App is sent to basically every school that you apply to.
The Common App essay is 650 words, and you have 7 prompts to pick from. (But note: It doesn’t matter which prompt you pick. In fact, I recommend you write your essay first and then choose the prompt to match it.)
Here are those Common App prompts:
Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.
So before diving into our Common App essay examples, here’s what to keep an eye on.
College admissions officers are looking for three things in your essay:
Who is this person?
Will this person contribute something of value to our campus?
Can this person write?
The reader should get a clear picture of what you value and how you’ll put those values into action.
How do you write a great common app essay?
I’ve got so much to say about how to write a Common App essay that it would make your head spin. But, here are the basics.
Brainstorm (I think it’s the most important step).
Structure your essay according to your topic.
Draft. Revise. Repeat.
Common App essay word limit.
The word limit for the Common App essay is 650. That doesn’t mean you need to use all 650 words—many of the great example essays below don’t. But as a general guideline, it’s a good idea to use most of that word count, since this essay is one of the primary ways a college gets a sense of who you are.
If you just want to see some great Common App essay examples, keep scrolling.
Be warned: some of these common application essay examples may inspire you.
(note: bold added to words added by us—see Tips + Analysis)
As I enter the double doors, the smell of freshly rolled biscuits hits me almost instantly. I trace the fan blades as they swing above me, emitting a low, repetitive hum resembling a faint melody. After bringing our usual order, the “Tailgate Special,” to the table, my father begins discussing the recent performance of Apple stock with my mother, myself, and my older eleven year old sister. Bojangle’s, a Southern establishment well known for its fried chicken and reliable fast food, is my family’s Friday night restaurant, often accompanied by trips to Eva Perry, the nearby library. With one hand on my breaded chicken and the other on Nancy Drew: Mystery of Crocodile Island, I can barely sit still as the thriller unfolds. They’re imprisoned! Reptiles! Not the enemy’s boat! As I delve into the narrative with a sip of sweet tea, I feel at home.
“Five, six, seven, eight!” As I shout the counts, nineteen dancers grab and begin to spin the tassels attached to their swords while walking heel-to-toe to the next formation of the classical Chinese sword dance. A glance at my notebook reveals a collection of worn pages covered with meticulously planned formations, counts, and movements. Through sharing videos of my performances with my relatives or discovering and choreographing the nuances of certain regional dances and their reflection on the region’s distinct culture, I deepen my relationship with my parents, heritage, and community. When I step on stage, the hours I’ve spent choreographing, creating poses, teaching, and polishing are all worthwhile, and the stage becomes my home.
Set temperature. Calibrate. Integrate. Analyze. Set temperature. Calibrate. Integrate. Analyze. This pulse mimics the beating of my heart, a subtle rhythm that persists each day I come into the lab. Whether I am working under the fume hood with platinum nanoparticles, manipulating raw integration data, or spraying a thin platinum film over pieces of copper, it is in Lab 304 in Hudson Hall that I first feel the distinct sensation, and I’m home. After spending several weeks attempting to synthesize platinum nanoparticles with a diameter between 10 and 16 nm, I finally achieve nanoparticles with a diameter of 14.6 nm after carefully monitoring the sulfuric acid bath. That unmistakable tingling sensation dances up my arm as I scribble into my notebook: I am overcome with a feeling of unbridled joy.
Styled in a t-shirt, shorts, and a worn, dark green lanyard, I sprint across the quad from the elective ‘Speaking Arabic through the Rassias Method’ to ‘Knitting Nirvana’. This afternoon is just one of many at Governor’s School East, where I have been transformed from a high school student into a philosopher, a thinker, and an avid learner. While I attend GS at Meredith College for Natural Science, the lessons learned and experiences gained extend far beyond physics concepts, serial dilutions, and toxicity. I learn to trust myself to have difficult yet necessary conversations about the political and economic climate. Governor’s School breeds a culture of inclusivity and multidimensionality, and I am transformed from “girl who is hardworking” or “science girl” to someone who indulges in the sciences, debates about psychology and the economy, and loves to swing and salsa dance. As I form a slip knot and cast on, I’m at home.
My home is a dynamic and eclectic entity. Although I’ve lived in the same house in Cary, North Carolina for 10 years, I have found and carved homes and communities that are filled with and enriched by tradition, artists, researchers, and intellectuals. While I may not always live within a 5 mile radius of a Bojangle’s or in close proximity to Lab 304, learning to become a more perceptive daughter and sister, to share the beauty of my heritage, and to take risks and redefine scientific and personal expectations will continue to impact my sense of home.
Tips + Analysis:
Precise details = efficient storytelling. Another writer may have written that they simply “worked in a lab” or that they “danced”, but not this writer. This writer knows how to quickly and deeply reveal the insights of lived experience. She’s not simply “working in a lab,” but she’s “spraying a thin platinum film over pieces of copper” and “monitoring the sulfuric acid bath.” Using those key, precise, “showing” details, she brings us into those moments in the lab, such that we can really see what her time there looks like. The result is that readers get a more comprehensive understanding of what those experiences have taught the writer.
Know your thread. In a montage essay, a writer uses a guiding thread to tie together different experiences from their life. Look at the bolded words in the essay to see how this writer builds her guiding thread: places where she feels at home. At the end of each paragraph she explains how the example she described relates to her experience of “home.” But notice the variability in her phrasing. She doesn’t simply end each paragraph by saying “I feel at home when X because Y.” She changes her phrasing up, but still always gets at the same idea (i.e., feeling at home). “But wait,” you might say, “why did she change her use of “home” in that lab paragraph.” Answer: because ending all four of the body paragraphs with “home” (notice that she saves her intro for the end—more on that in a moment) could easily feel repetitive. So she weaves “home” into the middle of the paragraph and at the end describes “That unmistakable feeling…” (emphasis added). In using this phrase, she evokes the concept of home by injecting familiarity into the reflection—what is unmistakable is familiar, and what is familiar, to this writer, is home.
Get forward-looking with your ending. Your English teacher may have told you to conclude your essays by restating your thesis. While that can be great advice for certain types of writing, you might want to try and get a bit more nuanced with your personal statement. For example, this writer actually saves what would normally be an intro for the final paragraph/conclusion, and doesn’t simply restate all the main points of her essay, but she explains how the lessons she’s learned will inform future actions. She does this most explicitly by saying that each experience she’s touched on in the essay will “continue to impact [her] sense of home.” With that phrase she makes clear to readers that she knows how to apply the lessons learned in this essay to her future.
It was Easter and we should’ve been celebrating with our family, but my father had locked us in the house. If he wasn’t going out, neither were my mother and I.
My mother came to the U.S. from Mexico to study English. She’d been an exceptional student and had a bright future ahead of her. But she fell in love and eloped with the man that eventually became my father. He loved her in an unhealthy way, and was both physically and verbally abusive. My mother lacked the courage to start over so she stayed with him and slowly let go of her dreams and aspirations. But she wouldn’t allow for the same to happen to me.
In the summer before my junior year I was offered a scholarship to study abroad in Egypt. Not to my surprise, my father refused to let me go. But my mother wouldn’t let him crush my dreams as well. I’d do this for myself and for my mothers unfulfilled aspirations. I accepted the scholarship.
I thought I’d finally have all the freedom I longed for in Egypt, but initially I didn’t. On a weekly basis I heard insults and received harassment in the streets, yet I didn’t yield to the societal expectations for women by staying indoors. I continued to roam throughout Egypt, exploring the Great Pyramids of Giza , cruising on the Nile, and traveling to Luxor and Aswan. And before I returned to the U.S. I received the unexpected opportunity to travel to London and Paris. It was surreal: a girl from the ghetto traveling alone around the world with a map in her hands And no man or cultural standards could dictate what I was to do. I rode the subway from Cambridge University to the British Museum. I took a train from London to Paris and in two days I visited the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral, and took a cruise on the Seine. Despite the language barrier I found I had the self-confidence to approach anyone for directions.
While I was in Europe enjoying my freedom, my mother moved out and rented her own place. It was as if we’d simultaneously gained our independence. We were proud of each other. And she vicariously lived through my experiences as I sent her pictures and told her about my adventures.
Finally, we were free.
I currently live in the U.S with my mother. My father has gradually transformed from a frigid man to the loving father I always yearned for. Life isn’t perfect, but for the moment I’m enjoying tranquility and stability with my family and are communicating much better than ever before.
I’m involved in my school’s Leadership Council as leader of our events committee. We plan and execute school dances and create effective donation letters. I see this as a stepping-stone for my future, as I plan to double major in Women’s Studies and International Relations with a focus on Middle Eastern studies. After the political turmoil of the Arab Spring many Middle Eastern countries refuse to grant women equal positions in society because that would contradict Islamic texts. By oppressing women they’re silencing half of their population. I believe these Islamic texts have been misinterpreted throughout time, and my journey towards my own independence has inspired me to help other women find liberation as well.
My Easter will drastically differ from past years. Rather than being locked at home, my mother and I will celebrate outdoors our rebirth and renewal.
Tips + Analysis:
Use details to hook the reader. An effective hook should do two things: engage the reader’s attention, and set up the direction/focus of the essay. This writer uses details to successfully do both of those things. Learning that her father had “locked [her and other mother] in the house, our attention is grasped by the apparent severity of the situation. Starting with this example also previews the exploration of freedom and independence later in the essay, setting the writer up to…
…End with a full-circle flourish. After the first paragraph, the essay moves away from that specific moment in the bathroom, not returning to it until the last paragraph. But they didn’t completely abandon the ideas of the opening in the middle paragraphs, right? Right—they used the middle to expand on and clarify the ideas suggested by the intro. By doing this, we come to see the opening as one of a few examples of men trying to control the writer’s life. By revisiting that locked-bathroom anecdote at the essay’s end, the writer crystallizes what they’ve learned through the events of the essay. In celebrating “outdoors [her and her mother’s] rebirth and renewal,” she asserts her newfound independence, confidence, and power. (See “Back to the beginning, but something’s changed” for more on this guide to different ways to end a personal statement.)
Keep the focus on you (even when others are involved). Your personal statement is about you. Other people may have been involved in the story you want to tell, but they shouldn’t be the stars of your essay’s show. For example, it’s clear that this writer’s mother played a key role in this essay, but the focus remains on the writer’s actions and learnings. She uses the second paragraph to provide just enough context on her family dynamic before pivoting to the “What I Did” part of the essay. There, our attention is focused mostly on how the writer responded to the essay’s challenges: she “continued to roam throughout Egypt”, “rode the subway from Cambridge University to the British Museum” and later became “involved in [her] school’s Leadership Council as leader.” By using those key details, she keeps her story focused on her.
In eighth grade, I was asked to write my hobbies and career goals, but I hesitated. Should I just make something up? I was embarrassed to tell people that my hobby was collecting cosmetics and that I wanted to become a cosmetic chemist. I worried others would judge me as too girlish and less competent compared to friends who wanted to work at the UN in foreign affairs or police the internet to crack down on hackers. The very fact that I was insecure about my "hobby" was perhaps proof that cosmetics was trivial, and I was a superficial girl for loving it.
But cosmetics was not just a pastime, it was an essential part of my daily life. In the morning I got up early for my skincare routine, using brightening skin tone and concealing blemishes, which gave me the energy and confidence throughout the day. At bedtime I relaxed with a soothing cleansing ritual applying different textures and scents of liquids, creams, sprays, and gels. My cosmetic collection was a dependable companion - rather than hiding it away, I decided instead to learn more about cosmetics, and to explore.
However, cosmetic science wasn't taught at school so I designed my own training. It began with the search for a local cosmetician to teach me the basics of cosmetics, and each Sunday I visited her lab to formulate organic products. A year of lab practice taught me how little I knew about ingredients, so my training continued with independent research on toxins. I discovered that safety in cosmetics was a contested issue amongst scientists, policy makers, companies, and consumer groups, variously telling me there are toxic ingredients that may or may not be harmful. I was frustrated by this uncertainty, yet motivated to find ways of sharing what I was learning with others.
Research spurred action. I began writing articles on the history of toxic cosmetics, from lead in Elizabethan face powder to lead in today's lipstick, and communicated with a large readership online. Positive feedback from hundreds of readers inspired me to step up my writing, to raise awareness with my peers, so I wrote a gamified survey for online distribution discussing the slack natural and organic labeling of cosmetics, which are neither regulated nor properly defined. At school I saw opportunities to affect real change and launched a series of green chemistry campaigns: the green agenda engaged the school community in something positive and was a magnet for creative student ideas, such as a recent project to donate handmade organic pet shampoo to local dog shelters. By senior year, I was pleased my exploration had gone well.
But on a recent holiday back home, I unpacked and noticed cosmetics had invaded much of my space over the years. Dresser top and drawers were crammed with unused tubes and jars — once handpicked with loving care — had now become garbage. I sorted through each hardened face powder and discolored lotion, remembering what had excited me about the product and how I'd used it. Examining these mementos led me to a surprising realization: yes, I had been a superficial girl obsessed with clear and flawless skin.
But there was something more too.
My makeup had given me confidence and comfort, and that was okay. I am glad I didn't abandon the superficial me, but instead acknowledged her, and stood by her to take her on an enlightening and rewarding journey. Cosmetics led me to dig deeper into scientific inquiry, helped me develop an impassioned voice, and became a tool to connect me with others. Together, I've learned that the beauty of a meaningful journey lies in getting lost for it was in the meandering that I found myself.
Tips + Analysis:
Find uncommon connections. Some content is more well-trodden than others. For example, many people write about how X sport taught them Y lesson about hard work, resulting in a dreaded “cliché” essay. There are a few remedies for avoiding cliché topics. This writer successfully employs “uncommon connections” to make her essay unique. When an application reader enters an essay about makeup, they’re likely not thinking that they’re going to read an essay about the value of scientific inquiry. This is one of the things that makes this essay so strong: it manages to connect ideas seldom connected. For your own essay, you might ask yourself, “what would the cliché version of my story focus on?” Or maybe even “what are the values one would expect an essay about X to focus on?” Then, try to come up with a few less-common values that you feel connect to your story.
Find the glue (between paragraphs). We enter each paragraph understanding how it’s going to relate to the ideas of the previous paragraph. How? This writer makes some great transitions. Take the start of paragraph two, for example. She begins with this: “But cosmetics was not just a pastime, it was an essential part of my daily life”. We’ve underlined the parts of that sentence that make it such a strong transition. By saying cosmetics were “not just a pastime,” the writer references the idea she used to end paragraph one. Then, by clarifying that cosmetics were “an essential part of [her] daily life,” she explains how she’s going to explore the significance of cosmetics in this next paragraph. The result is that we’re able to follow a clear train of thought: at first, cosmetics seemed like just a pastime, but I later realized they were an essential part of daily life.
Build an arc. Notice how this writer’s relationship to cosmetics develops over the course of the essay. She opens by noting that she was “insecure” for her love of cosmetics, thinking it made her “superficial.” The next middle paragraphs then explain how specific experiences provided more nuance to her relationship with cosmetics. Finally, when we get to that ending paragraph, we see a familiar but importantly different relationship with cosmetics: yes, she thinks she was “superficial,” but her experiences have led her to express gratitude for that past version of herself, not shame.
Transformers are not just for boys. I loved these amazing robots that could transform into planes and cars the first time I saw them in the toy store. The boys had all the samples, refusing to let me play with one. When I protested loudly to my mother, she gently chided me that Transformers were ugly and unfeminine. She was wrong.
When I moved from China to Canada, my initial excitement turned to dismay as my peers were not as understanding of my language barrier as I’d hoped. I joined the robotics team in a desperate attempt to find a community, though I doubted I would fit into the male-dominated field. Once I used physics to determine gear ratio, held a drill for the first time, and jumped into the pit to fix a robot, I was hooked.
I went back to China that summer to bring robotics to my friends. I asked them to join me in the technology room at my old school and showed them how to use power tools to create robot parts. I pitched my idea to the school principal and department heads. By the time I left China, my old school had a team.
Throughout the next year, I guided my Chinese team-only one of three that existed in the country-with the help of social media. I translated instructions, set building deadlines and coached them on how to answer judges’ questions.
I returned to China a year later to lead my team through their first Chinese-hosted international competition. Immediately upon arrival to the competition, I gave the Chinese head official important documents for urgent distribution. I knew all the Chinese teams would need careful instructions on the rules and procedures. I was surprised when the competition descended into confusion and chaos. Government policies against information sharing had blocked the Chinese teams from receiving information and the Chinese organizers hadn’t distributed my documents. I decided to create another source of knowledge for my fledgling robotics teams.
It took me several weeks to create a sharing platform that students could access through the firewall. On it, I shared my experience and posted practical practice challenges. I received hundreds of shares and had dozens of discussion questions posted.
My platform’s popularity created an unintended issue; it garnered the attention and reprimand of the Chinese robotics organizations. When a head official reached out to my Canadian mentors, warning them to stop my involvement with the Chinese teams, I was concerned. When a Chinese official publicly chastised me on a major robotics forum, I was heartbroken. They made it clear that my gender, my youth, and my information sharing approach was not what they wanted.
I considered quitting. But so many students reached out to me requesting help. I wanted to end unnecessary exclusion. I worked to enhance access to my platform. I convinced Amazon to sponsor my site, giving it access to worldwide high-speed servers. Although I worried about repercussions, I continued to translate and share important documents.
During the busy building season, my platform is swamped with discussions, questions and downloads. I have organized a group of friends to help me monitor the platform daily so that no question or request is left unanswered. Some of my fears have come true: I have been banned from several Chinese robotics forums. I am no longer allowed to attend Chinese robotics competitions in China as a mentor. The Chinese government has taken down my site more than once.
Robotics was my first introduction to the wonderful world of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. I am dedicated to the growth of robotics in places where it is needed and wanted. I have used my hands and mind to tear down all barriers that separate people, no matter gender or nationality, from the inspiration and exploration of STEM.
Transformers, robotics and STEM are for boys and girls, even in China.
Tips + Analysis:
Vary your structure. No matter how interesting its content might be, few people greet the text-wall of a 20 sentence paragraph with joy. Shorter, clearly-purposed, digestible paragraphs often make for more approachable writing. The above writer knows this. She takes her time when she needs to develop key examples, like she does in paragraph five, and is quick and efficient when she’s building to a point, like she does in two-sentence paragraph four (and yes, one or two sentence paragraphs are totally fine on a college personal statement). She does this not only with her paragraphs, but with her sentences, too. The punchiness of “She was wrong” at the end of the first paragraph is achieved by its contrast with the longer, more-complex previous two sentences.
Get clear on what you did. “What did you do in your volunteer work?” asks the admissions officer reading your essay. “I helped out,” you respond, failing to seize a moment to tell us about the awesome things you actually did. The writer of this essay certainly “helped out” with her robotics team, but she did so much more than that, yes? How do we know this? Well, she uses some really strong action verbs along the way to show us what she did. Take paragraph four, for example. The first sentence introduces the general idea of her being a “guide” for her robotics team in China, and then the second sentence gives us some very-specific examples of what that guidance looked like. She “ translated instructions,” “set building deadlines” and “coached” her teammates on how to answer judges’ questions.” Want to attain that level of clarity in your own writing? Consider checking out our epic list of verbs for some guidance on how to clearly describe actions you took in your application essays.
Show us the effect you had. This writer doesn’t only use clear verbs and details to show us what she did, she also uses them to show us the effects her actions had. Look at paragraph six for a great example of this. Describing the effects of her creating an online sharing platform, she writes, “I received hundreds of shares and had dozens of discussion questions posted.” Later, she notes that “The Chinese government has taken down my site more than once.” She could have simply written that “a lot of people used her platform,” or that “The Chinese government took issue with my website,” but she doesn’t. Instead, she uses key details to show the effects of her actions.
On “Silent Siege Day,” many students in my high school joined the Students for Life club and wore red armbands with “LIFE” on them. As a non-Catholic in a Catholic school, I knew I had to be cautious in expressing my opinion on the abortion debate. However, when I saw that all of the armband-bearing students were male, I could not stay silent.
I wrote on Instagram, “pro-choice does not necessarily imply pro-abortion; it means that we respect a woman’s fundamental right to make her own choice regarding her own body.”
Some of my peers expressed support but others responded by calling me a dumb bitch, among other names. When I demanded an apology for the name-calling, I was told I needed to learn to take a joke: “you have a lot of anger, I think you need a boyfriend.” Another one of my peers apparently thought the post was sarcastic (?) and said “I didn’t know women knew how to use sarcasm.”
One by one, I responded. I was glad to have sparked discussion, but by midnight, I was mentally and emotionally exhausted.
Completely overwhelmed by the 140+ comments, I looked to my parents for comfort, assuming they would be proud of me for standing up for my beliefs. But instead, they told me to remove the post and to keep quiet, given the audience. I refused to remove the post, but decided to stay silent.
For months, I heard students talking about “The Post,” and a new sense of self-consciousness felt like duct tape over my mouth. As I researched the history of Planned Parenthood (to respond to someone accusing it of “the genocide of black babies”), I became interested in the history of the feminist movement. At the same time, I was studying the Civil Rights Movement in my history class, and researching my feminist critique of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I gradually began to realize that refusing to conform to the conventions of society is what propels us toward equality. Martin Luther King was arrested nearly thirty times for ‘civil disobedience’ and Susan B. Anthony for ‘illegal voting.’ Letting the social media backlash silence my own fight for social justice seemed silly and unacceptable.
Before The Post, I naïvely thought that sexism was dead, but I came to see its ubiquity, whether it’s painfully conspicuous or seemingly innocuous. Knowing that young girls are especially vulnerable to constricting gender stereotypes, I Googled “girls empowerment programs” and called Girls on the Run to see how I could help. As a junior coach, I spend my Monday and Thursday afternoons with middle school girls, running, singing Taylor Swift songs, discussing our daily achievements (I got 100 on my math test!), and setting goals for the next day. The girls celebrate their accomplishments and talk about themselves positively, fully expressing their self-esteem.
After The Post, I also Googled ‘how to be politically active,’ and signed petitions for the Medicare for All Act, the Raise the Wage Act, and the EACH Woman Act, among others. In response to the transgender military ban, I called the White House (they hung up as soon as I said “as a human rights advocate...,” but I tried). It feels good to sign petitions, but I’m still not doing enough. I want to fight for social justice in the courtroom.
My role model Ruth Bader Ginsburg says, “dissent[ers] speak to a future age... they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.” Retrospectively, I realize that The Post was my voice of dissent―through it, I initiated a campus-wide discussion and openly challenged the majority opinion of my school for the first time. As I aspire to become a civil rights attorney and the first Asian woman on the Supreme Court (I hope it doesn’t take that long!), I am confident that I will continue to write and speak out for justice ―for tomorrow.
Tips + Analysis:
Keep the focus on action and outcome. In this narrative essay, the writer uses roughly the first ⅓ of her story to describe challenges, and the effects of those challenges. By the time we get to the “One by one…” paragraph, she pivots to start describing specific things she did to respond to those challenges, weaving in things she learned along the way. Notice the ratio there: ⅓ of the essay focuses on the problem, leaving a whole ⅔ of the word count to discuss actions, and the outcomes of those actions. If you’re writing a narrative essay, let that ratio be a guide. Application readers are interested in learning about your challenges, but are most interested in how you responded to them.
Use clear verbs to show us what you did. Maybe you and your friends ‘worked hard’ on a project during your junior year of high school. That’s great! But simply telling us that you ‘worked hard’ doesn’t really tell us much about what happened. So how do you give us a better sense of what you did? Use clear action verbs. Notice how many action verbs this writer uses: “I wrote on Instagram”, “I demanded an apology”, “singing Taylor Swift songs”, “I called the White House.” There are many more, all of which give us an easy-to-see sense of what this writer did. Need some help thinking of verbs for your own essays? Check out our epic list of verbs for some ideas.
Keep your timeline in order. In this narrative essay, the writer chronologically organizes her paragraphs, making it easy for us to follow along with the sequence of events. She starts with the origins of that Instagram post, discusses people’s reactions to it, shows how she responded to those reactions, and finally tells us what she learned. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the structure—a lot of thought likely went into the ordering of ideas. By precisely choosing which moments in the timeline to show us, the writer keeps control of the story. Look at the transition from paragraph four to paragraph five, for example. When the writer says “for months, I heard students talking about ‘The Post…’”, we get the sense that a lot has transpired since she made that Instagram post. But she doesn’t tell us about every whisper she heard in the hallway, or every comment made in class, does she? Instead, she’s precise, telling us only the details necessary to move the action forward.
“¡Mijo! ¡Ya levantate! ¡Se hace tarde!” (Son! Wake up! It's late already.) My father’s voice pierced into my room as I worked my eyes open. We were supposed to open the restaurant earlier that day.
Ever since 5th grade, I have been my parents’ right hand at Hon Lin Restaurant in our hometown of Hermosillo, Mexico. Sometimes, they needed me to be the cashier; other times, I was the youngest waiter on staff. Eventually, when I got strong enough, I was called into the kitchen to work as a dishwasher and a chef’s assistant.
The restaurant took a huge toll on my parents and me. Working more than 12 hours every single day (even holidays), I lacked paternal guidance, thus I had to build autonomy at an early age. On weekdays, I learned to cook my own meals, wash my own clothes, watch over my two younger sisters, and juggle school work.
One Christmas Eve we had to prepare 135 turkeys as a result of my father’s desire to offer a Christmas celebration to his patrons. We began working at 11pm all the way to 5am. At one point, I noticed the large dark bags under my father’s eyes. This was the scene that ignited the question in my head: “Is this how I want to spend the rest of my life?”
The answer was no.
So I started a list of goals. My first objective was to make it onto my school’s British English Olympics team that competed in an annual English competition in the U.K. After two unsuccessful attempts, I got in. The rigorous eight months of training paid off as we defeated over 150 international schools and lifted the 2nd Place cup; pride permeated throughout my hometown.
Despite the euphoria brought by victory, my sense of stability would be tested again, and therefore my goals had to adjust to the changing pattern.
During the summer of 2014, my parents sent me to live in the United States on my own to seek better educational opportunities. I lived with my grandparents, who spoke Taishan (a Chinese dialect I wasn’t fluent in). New responsibilities came along as I spent that summer clearing my documentation, enrolling in school, and getting electricity and water set up in our new home. At 15 years old, I became the family’s financial manager, running my father’s bank accounts, paying bills and insurance, while also translating for my grandmother, and cleaning the house.
In the midst of moving to a new country and the overwhelming responsibilities that came with it, I found an activity that helped me not only escape the pressures around me but also discover myself. MESA introduced me to STEM and gave me nourishment and a new perspective on mathematics. As a result, I found my potential in math way beyond balancing my dad’s checkbooks.
My 15 years in Mexico forged part of my culture that I just cannot live without. Trying to fill the void for a familiar community, I got involved with the Association of Latin American students, where I am now an Executive Officer. I proudly embrace the identity I left behind. I started from small debates within the club to discussing bills alongside 124 Chicanos/Latinos at the State Capitol of California.
The more I scratch off from my goals list, the more it brings me back to those days handling spatulas. Anew, I ask myself, “Is this how I want to spent the rest of my life?” I want a life driven by my passions, rather than the impositions of labor. I want to explore new paths and grow within my community to eradicate the prejudicial barriers on Latinos. So yes, this IS how I want to spend the rest of my life.
Tips + Analysis:
Use structure to your advantage. Take a moment to count the number of sentences in each paragraph of this essay. Really, do this. I’ll wait…
Good? Okay, let’s talk about what you might have noticed. Rather than the bulkier paragraphs one may produce in a literary analysis paper in English class, this writer keeps the paragraphs short and sweet—the shortest ones are one sentence long, the longer ones are four-ish sentences. This has a lot of effects on the story. Here are two of important ones: 1. It simply makes the essay look more inviting. You could have the most engaging story ever, but if it comes in the form of a 10 sentence wall-of-text, you’re going to be putting your readers off. 2. It enables the writer to emphasize certain ideas. Check out paragraph five, for example: “The answer was no.” That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And, sandwiched between the longer paragraphs four and six, it calls attention to what it says, emphasizing the significance of this realization in the writer’s life.
Start with tension, then fill us in later. This essay hooks our attention by starting us in a moment of high tension. Reading those first lines, we think “Someone’s yelling? Why?” It’s our desire for context that propels our attention into the next paragraph. There, the writer quickly clarifies what’s going on in the opening sentences: he fulfills many responsibilities in his family’s restaurant, and so he often needs to wake up early to work.
What story can your activities list not tell? We like to think of your personal statement as the heart of your application. It’s an opportunity to show readers the essence of who you are as a person. This means it’s a great opportunity to let people in on the motivations behind what you do in your day to day life. I’m going to bet that this writer has included his experiences with MESA and the Association of Latin American Students on his Common App Activities List. I’m also going to bet that he didn’t discuss anything about his deeper motivations for doing those activities in his activities list (he wouldn’t really have space to do that anyway). You know what is a great space to dig into the backstory of those activities? Your personal statement. That’s what this writer does, right? What made him want to be a part of the Association of Latin American Students? Well, he was “trying to fill the void for a familiar community.” What prior experiences informed his work with MESA? Well, he was quite comfortable “balancing [his] dad’s checkbooks.”
I’m no stranger to contrast. A Chinese American with accented Chinese, a Florida-born Texan, a first generation American with a British passport: no label fits me without a caveat.
But I’ve always strived to find connections among the dissimilar. In my home across the sea, although my relatives’ rapid Mandarin sails over my head, in them I recognize the same work ethic that carried my parents out of rural Shanghai to America, that fueled me through sweltering marching band practices and over caffeinated late nights. I even spend my free time doing nonograms, grid-based logic puzzles solved by using clues to fill in seemingly random pixels to create a picture.
It started when I was a kid. One day, my dad captured my fickle kindergartner attention (a herculean feat) and taught me Sudoku. As he explained the rules, those mysterious scaffoldings of numbers I often saw on his computer screen transformed into complex structures of logic built by careful strategy.
From then on, I wondered if I could uncover the hidden order behind other things in my life. In elementary school, I began to recognize patterns in the world around me: thin, dark clouds signaled rain, the moon changed shape every week, and the best snacks were the first to go. I wanted to know what unseen rules affected these things and how they worked. My parents, both pipeline engineers, encouraged this inquisitiveness and sometimes tried explaining to me how they solved puzzles in their own work. Although I didn’t understand the particulars, their analytical mindsets helped me muddle through math homework and optimize matches in Candy Crush.
In high school, I studied by linking concepts across subjects as if my coursework was another puzzle to solve. PEMDAS helped me understand appositive phrases, and the catalysts for revolutions resembled chemical isotopes, nominally different with the same properties.
As I grew older, my interests expanded to include the delicate systems of biology, the complexity of animation, and the nuances of language. Despite these subjects’ apparent dissimilarity, each provided fresh, fascinating perspectives on the world with approaches like color theory and evolution. I was (and remain) voracious for the new and unusual, spending hours entrenched in Wikipedia articles on obscure topics, i.e. classical ciphers or dragons, and analyzing absurdist YouTube videos.
Unsurprisingly, like pilot fish to their sharks, my career aspirations followed my varied passions: one day I wanted to be an illustrator, the next a biochemist, then a stand-up comedian. When it came to narrowing down the choices, narrowing down myself, I felt like nothing would satisfy my ever-fluctuating intellectual appetite.
But when I discovered programming, something seemed to settle. In computer science, I had found a field where I could be creative, explore a different type of language, and (yes) solve puzzles. Coding let me both analyze logic in its purest form and manipulate it to accomplish anything from a simple “print ‘hello world’” to creating functional games. Even when lines of red error messages fill my console, debugging offered me the same thrill as a particularly good puzzle. Now, when I see my buggy versions of Snake, Paint, and Pacman in my files, I’m filled paradoxically with both satisfaction and a restless itch to improve the code and write new, better programs.
While to others my life may seem like a jumble of incompatible fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle, each piece connects to become something more. However, there are still missing pieces at the periphery: experiences to have, knowledge to gain, bad jokes to tell. Someday I hope to solve the unsolvable. But for now, I’ve got a nonogram with my name on it.
Tips + Analysis:
Consider how structure can relate to your content. Much of this essay is about a certain kind of chaos, right? Let me suggest that the writer’s sentence structure often (intentionally, and to great effect) mimics that chaos. Let’s look at a sentence from paragraph seven:
Unsurprisingly, like pilot fish to their sharks, my career aspirations followed my varied passions: one day I wanted to be an illustrator, the next a biochemist, then a stand-up comedian.
Notice how many twists and turns this sentence makes amidst the commas:; after each one, the writer introduces a new idea. In this way, the structure mirrors the content. Compare that with the simplicity of a sentence that comes soon after in the next paragraph:
But when I discovered programming, something seemed to settle.
This reads quite differently than the other sentence, right? It’s calmer. It’s more simple. It maybe even sounds like the writer himself has “settled.” See what’s happening there? The writer uses sentence structure to enhance the argument they’re about to make about computer science.
Seek insight in the everyday. Your college application is rife with opportunities to brag about yourself. Your activities list, for example, is a place where you tell people about all sorts of extracurriculars you do. But life’s made up of significant moments outside of what fits on an activities list (right?!). This writer probably didn’t mention anything about nonograms, Candy Crush, or Wikipedia research anywhere else in their application. And yet those experiences are essential to the argument they’re making here. People often feel like they need to have gone through some wild, extraordinary experiences to make for compelling personal statement content. While that content certainly can work, the success of your personal statement is just as (perhaps more) dependent on how you write about your experiences. So yes, skydiving with sharks can be great content. So too can playing Candy Crush (if you can find the insight in it).
Growing up, my world was basketball. My summers were spent between the two solid black lines. My skin was consistently tan in splotches and ridden with random scratches. My wardrobe consisted mainly of track shorts, Nike shoes, and tournament t-shirts. Gatorade and Fun Dip were my pre-game snacks. The cacophony of rowdy crowds, ref whistles, squeaky shoes, and scoreboard buzzers was a familiar sound. I was the team captain of almost every team I played on—familiar with the Xs and Os of plays, commander of the court, and the coach’s right hand girl.
But that was only me on the surface.
Deep down I was an East-Asian influenced bibliophile and a Young Adult fiction writer.
Hidden in the cracks of a blossoming collegiate level athlete was a literary fiend. I devoured books in the daylight. I crafted stories at night time. After games, after practice, after conditioning I found nooks of solitude. Within these moments, I became engulfed in a world of my own creation. Initially, I only read young adult literature, but I grew to enjoy literary fiction and self-help: Kafka, Dostoevsky, Branden, Csikszentmihalyi. I expanded my bubble to Google+ critique groups, online discussion groups, blogs, writing competitions and clubs. I wrote my first novel in fifth grade, my second in seventh grade, and started my third in ninth grade. Reading was instinctual. Writing was impulsive.
I stumbled upon the movies of Hayao Miyazaki at a young age. I related a lot to the underlying East Asian philosophy present in his movies. My own perspective on life, growth, and change was echoed in his storytelling. So, I read his autobiographies, watched anime, and researched ancient texts—Analects, The Way, Art of War. Then, I discovered the books of Haruki Murakami whom I now emulate in order to improve my writing.
Like two sides of a coin, I lived in two worlds. One world was outward—aggressive, noisy, invigorating; the other, internal—tempestuous, serene, nuanced.
Internal and external conflict ensued. Many times I was seen only as an athlete and judged by the stereotypes that come with it: self-centered, unintelligent, listens to rap. But off the court, I was more reflective, empathetic and I listened to music like Florence and the Machine. I was even sometimes bullied for not acting “black enough.” My teammates felt that my singular focus should be basketball and found it strange that I participated in so many extracurriculars.
But why should I be one-dimensional? I had always been motivated to reach the pinnacle of my potential in whatever I was interested in. Why should I be defined by only one aspect of my life? I felt like I had to pick one world.
Then I had an ACL injury. And then another. And then another.
After the first ACL surgery, my family and I made the decision to homeschool. I knew I wanted to explore my many interests—literature, novel writing, East Asian culture, and basketball—equally. So I did. I found time to analyze Heart of Darkness and used my blog to instruct adult authors how to become self-published authors. I researched Shintoism, read dozens of books on writing and self-improvement. My sister and I had been talking for a while about starting a nonprofit focused on social awareness, education, and community outreach. Finally, we had the time to do it.
While basketball has equipped me with leadership skills and life experiences, it is only one part of who I am. As a socially aware, intellectual, and introspective individual, I value creative expression and independence. My life’s mission is to reach my full potential in order to help others reach their own.
Tips + Analysis:
Look for your evidence. I’m guessing you leave the first paragraph knowing that basketball was a big part of this writer’s life. But ask yourself this question: how do I know basketball was a big part of her life?. The answer is in the evidence. Look at all those specific things she shows us: “two solid black lines”, “Gatorade and Fun Dip”, “tournament t-shirts.” We know she was so intimately intertwined with basketball because she proves it by showing us what her life consisted of. Maybe you want to tell people you loved computer programming or horseback riding. What evidence can you point to to prove that love?
This writer plays with our expectations. After they prove their deep acquaintance with basketball in paragraph one, they make an essential pivot by saying this: “but that was only me on the surface.” This comes as a bit of a surprise given how much they discussed basketball in the previous paragraph. They set readers up to expect an essay about how much they love basketball, but then quickly and succinctly clarify that the essay is about to turn in a very different direction (which is a nice hook technique).
An ending can reframe an opening. You may have heard in your English class that you’re supposed to conclude your essays by restating your thesis. We heard that a lot, too. And while this can work for some papers, you have a lot of options for ending your personal statement. Take a look at what this writer does, for example. Earlier in the essay, she said “that was only me on the surface” when talking about her relationship with basketball. That could essentially serve as the thesis for this essay. But then she ends by returning to that idea in a similar, yet importantly different way, saying “While basketball has equipped me with leadership skills and life experiences, it is only one part of who I am.” In a way, she does restate a concept she opened the essay with, but she does so by more fully fleshing out the idea, clarifying not only that the basketball player was the “surface” version of herself, but those opening details weren’t even indicative of the main things she learned from basketball (which are “leadership skills and life experiences”).
When I was a little girl, I imagined I had superpowers. Deadly lasers would shoot from my eyes pulverizing the monsters hiding under my bed. Mom would wonder where I had magically disappeared to after I turned invisible as she forced me to eat that plate of broccoli. It was the wish I made on every birthday candle and upon every bright star.
Who knew my dream would come true.
I discovered my first power when I turned 14. My mom had been diagnosed with Ovarian cancer my freshman year of high school. Seated alone in my room, I became lost in a cycle of worry and panic. In the midst of my downward spiral, I reached out for a small bristled paintbrush, guiding it across the canvas—the motion gave me peace. My emotions spilled out onto the canvas, staining my clothes with a palette of blues and blacks. A sense of calm replaced the anxiety and fear which had gripped me tightly for so many months. Painting gave me the power to heal myself and find peace in a scary situation.
Little did I know, sharing my superpower would lead me to unfamiliar parts of my city. I was alerted to trouble at an elementary school in Dallas where students’ access to the arts was under threat from budget cuts. I joined forces with the principal and the school’s community service representative to create an afterschool arts program. From paper masks in October to pots of sunshine crafts in March, it did more than teach students to freely draw and color; it created a community where kids connected with the power of art to express joy, hope, and identity. The program, now in its third year, has succeeded in reaching kids deprived of art. Sharing art with these students has given me the power to step outside of my familiar surroundings and connect with kids I never would have met otherwise. I am grateful for the power of art to not only heal but to also connect with others.
I knew my powers worked on a local level but I wanted to reach out globally. For four years, I have been searching for a way to defeat the scourge of child marriage, a leading cause of poverty in rural India. I discovered a formula in which girls’ education successfully defeats child marriage as part of my capstone project through the Academy of Global Studies (AGS) program at my school.
I took my powers overseas, flying 8,535 miles to arrive at a dilapidated school in the bleak slums of Jaipur, India. While conducting interviews with pre-adolescent girls stuffed into dusty classrooms, I learned of their grey routines: rising early to obtain well-water, cooking, cleaning and caring for younger siblings prior to rushing to school. Despite the efforts of keeping these girls in school to prevent child marriage, their school relied on rote memorization without any creative arts programming. As I organized my art project for these girls, I was unsure if my powers would reach them. Their initial skepticism and uncertainty slowly transformed into wonder and joy as they brought their bright paper fish cut-outs to life. The experience opened my eyes to the power of art to form universal connections, and it inspires me to share and strengthen its force within the lives of all children.
Much of the little girl yearning for superpowers remains a part of me. But now I have moved beyond wishing for powers to acquiring a deeper understanding of how superpowers work. While I never fulfilled my wish to run at lightning speeds or shoot spiderwebs from my fingers, my experiences with art have taught me that the greatest superpowers lie within each of us—the powers to create, express, and connect in meaningful ways. Every girl deserves the chance to dream, I am just lucky mine came true.
Tips + Analysis:
The metaphor stays consistent. One of the joys of this essay is that the writer applies fantastical language to real events. In doing this, she demonstrates how her desire for fantastical “superpowers” in her youth actualized as her real-life, art-related superpowers. But notice how subtly she manages to keep the “superpower” concept in our heads. Phrases like “alerted to trouble,” “joined forces,” and “defeat the scourge” show a nice degree of craft, and couple with her more overt mentioning of “powers” to illustrate her perception of herself as a superhero. By making these small moves throughout the essay, she not only keeps a consistent metaphor running throughout, but she also achieves…
…a surprising but inevitable ending, two characteristics we encourage you to keep in mind when thinking about ways to end your personal statement. What’s inevitable about this ending? Well, consider those subtle moves with metaphor we talked about above; all throughout the essay, she’s essentially been making the argument that she has developed her own superpowers. When we get to the end, it feels like there’s no other option but for her to realize this. What’s surprising? Notice the shift in her desires from the essay’s outset. In the opening paragraph, her younger self conceives of superpowers as having to do with “deadly lasers” shooting from her eyes and “pulverizing” literal “ monsters.” That’s changed at the end, hasn’t it? She concludes by making clear that she still kind of wants to be able to “run at lightning speeds,” but more than that, she’s found gratitude for superpowers she thinks are more important: expression, creation, connection (showing maturation through insight).
Does every life matter? Because it seems like certain lives matter more than others, especially when it comes to money.
I was in eighth grade when a medical volunteer group that my dad had led to Northern Thailand faced a dilemma of choosing between treating a patient with MDR-TB or saving $5000 (the estimated treatment cost for this patient) for future patients. I remember overhearing intense conversations outside the headquarters tent. My dad and his friend were arguing that we should treat the woman regardless of the treatment cost, whereas the others were arguing that it simply cost too much to treat her. Looking back, it was a conflict between ideals—one side argued that everyone should receive treatment whereas the other argued that interventions should be based on cost-effectiveness. I was angry for two reasons. First, because my father lost the argument. Second, because I couldn’t logically defend what I intuitively believed: that every human being has a right to good health. In short, that every life matters.
Over the next four years I read piles of books on social justice and global health equity in order to prove my intuitive belief in a logical manner. I even took online courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. But I failed to find a clear, logical argument for why every life mattered. I did, however, find sound arguments for the other side, supporting the idea that society should pursue the well-being of the greatest number, that interventions should mitigate the most death and disability per dollar spent. Essentially, my research screamed, “Kid, it’s all about the numbers.”
But I continued searching, even saving up pocket money to attend a summer course on global health at Brown University. It was there that I met Cate Oswald, a program director for Partners in Health (PIH), an organization that believed “the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.” It was like finding a ray of light in the darkness.
Refueled with hope, I went back to find the answer, but this time I didn’t dive into piles of books or lectures. I searched my memories. Why was I convinced that every life mattered?
When the woman with MDR-TB came to our team, she brought along with her a boy that looked about my age. Six years have passed since I met him, but I still remember the gaze he gave me as he left with his mother. It wasn’t angry, nor was it sad. It was, in a way, serene. It was almost as if he knew this was coming. That burdened me. Something inside me knew this wasn’t right. It just didn’t feel right. Perhaps it was because I, for a second, placed myself in his shoes, picturing what I’d feel if my mother was the woman with MDR-TB.
Upon reflection, I found that my answer didn’t exist in books or research, but somewhere very close from the beginning—my intuition. In other words, I didn’t need an elaborate and intricate reason to prove to myself that health is an inalienable right for every human being—I needed self-reflection.
So I ask again, “Does every life matter?” Yes. “Do I have solid, written proof?” No.
Paul Farmer once said, “The thing about rights is that in the end you can’t prove what is a right.” To me, global health is not merely a study. It’s an attitude—a lens I use to look at the world—and it’s a statement about my commitment to health as a fundamental quality of liberty and equity.
Tips + Analysis:
What’s the big idea? Here’s a writer who thoroughly understands their own argument, knowing everything from its broader applications to its minute components. They kinda state the essay’s big idea right at the beginning, don’t they? By asking “does every life matter?”, they immediately frame the essay with its two key values: health and equity.
Clear challenges lead to clear actions. The writer pretty explicitly articulates the essay’s challenge at the end of the second paragraph, saying that “[they] couldn’t logically defend what [they] intuitively believed: that every human being has a right to good health.” Having so clearly established the essay’s challenge makes it easy for them to show how experiences and activities (e.g., “summer course on global health at Brown…”) were done in response to those challenges. Think about it this way: someone else taking that summer course at Brown may have been there for completely different reasons, right? Rather than equity, maybe that person was more motivated by a love of scientific innovation in medicine. That’s great for that person, but it doesn’t feel like an accurate description of what put this writer there, yes? We know what they care about, and because of this, we understand the motivations behind the actions they show us.
Be cautious when using quotes. A lot of writers are tempted to include famous quotes right at the beginning of their essays. This quote is perfect! I imagine them thinking, it aligns clearly with my values! That may be true, and while you may really want to encourage others to “be the change they want to see in the world,” or understand that a “penny saved is a penny earned,” using quotes in this way risks making your essay sound cliché. This is not to say that you can’t use quotes at all. Rather, if you are going to use them, you need to think of uncommon ways to include them. This writer accomplishes this for two reasons:
The quote comes at the end of the essay. When starting an essay with a quote, it often has the effect of putting the focus on someone besides the essay’s writer. By including at the end, the writer uses the quote as a way to show something they’ve learned.
It’s not a super-common quote. At least when compared to some of the more often used quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, or Ben Franklin.
For over two years, my final class of the day has been nontraditional. No notes, no tests, no official assignments. Just a twenty-three minute lecture every Monday through Thursday, which I watched from my couch. Professor Jon Stewart would lecture his class about the news of the day, picking apart the absurdities of current events.
The Daily Show inspired me to explore the methods behind the madness of the world Stewart satirized. Although I’d always had a passion for the news, I evolved from scrolling through Yahoo’s homepage to reading articles from The New York Times and The Economist. I also began to tie in knowledge I learned in school. I even caught The Daily Show inexcusably putting a picture of John Quincy Adams at a table with the founding fathers instead of John Adams! Thanks, APUSH.
Clearly, The Daily Show has a political slant. However, Stewart convinced me that partisan media, regardless of its political affiliation, can significantly impact its viewers’ political beliefs. I wrote a psychology paper analyzing the polarizing effects of the media and how confirmation bias leads already opinionated viewers to ossify their beliefs. As a debater, I’ve learned to argue both sides of an issue, and the hardest part of this is recognizing one’s own biases. I myself had perhaps become too biased from my viewing of The Daily Show, and ultimately this motivated me to watch CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, allowing me to assimilate information from opposing viewpoints.
I embraced my new role as an intellectual moderator in academic discourse… at my friend’s 17th birthday party. It was there that two friends started arguing over the Baltimore riots. One argued that the anti-police rhetoric of the protest was appalling; the other countered by decrying the clear presence of race discrimination still in the country. Both had their biases: the friend who argued on behalf of the police was the son of a police officer, while my friend who defended the protests personally knew people protesting in Baltimore. I questioned both on their positions, and ultimately, both reconsidered the other’s perspective.
However, I began to wonder: was I excusing myself from the responsibility of taking a position on key issues? Perhaps there are times that I shouldn’t merely understand both sides, but actually choose one. In biology, for example, we studied the debates over evolution and climate change. Is it my role, as an informed student, to advocate both sides of the debate, despite one side being overwhelmingly supported by scientific evidence? Maybe I must sometimes shed my identity as Devil’s advocate and instead be an advocate for my own convictions.
Although I don’t have a news (or fake news) network where I can voice my opinions, I look towards further assessing my own viewpoints while maintaining my role as an impartial academic debater. I am eager to delve into an intellectual environment that challenges me to decide when to be objective and when to embrace my bias and argue for my own beliefs.
Tips + Analysis:
Practice precision in your examples. When applying to college, it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you haven’t done as many cool things as your peers. I haven’t even started a lion training club! you might think, what school will want me? Don’t fret. Your examples don’t need to be extravagant. They can just be precise. Take a look at this writer’s examples, for example (ha!). Adhering to the proverbial “show don’t tell,” they show us fairly commonplace experiences: they watched The Daily Show, they wrote a paper on bias in their psychology class, they moderated discussion at a birthday party. Not to belittle this writer’s experiences, but you agree this is all far from lion training, yes? And yet the examples work well because they feel genuine and specific. So when you’re on the edge of the “I haven’t done enough!” thinking-trap, consider that authenticity can take precedence over grandeur.
Questions can show development. Towards the end of the essay, the writer asks this key question: “was I excusing myself from the responsibility of taking a position on key issues?” When we get to that question, consider what’s changed from the opening paragraphs. They initially described themselves as entertaining all viewpoints in an effort to reduce their bias. But when they ask this question, they offer one of the essay’s insights: they’ve learned that they simply can’t stomach being a devil’s advocate for some issues. Some issues, they realize, compel them to advocate, not speculate.
Turn the essay’s ideas toward the future. The final paragraph gets forward looking. This writer hasn’t articulated what they want to major in or what kind of career they aspire to, and yet we’re able to see how the lessons they’ve learned will inform their future actions. They do this when they explain that they are “eager to delve into an intellectual environment that challenges [them] to decide when to be objective and when to embrace [their] bias and argue for [their] own beliefs.” They’re telling readers something crucial about the kind of person they will be when they get to college. It’s easy for me to see this writer engaging in lively discussions in the dining halls and the dorms. So even if you’re not quite sure what you want to major in yet or what career you want to pursue, ask yourself this question: what are you “eager to delve into” when you get to college? Your own forward-looking ending may come from reflecting on that question.
My story begins at about the age of two, when I first learned what a maze was. For most people, solving mazes is a childish phase, but I enjoyed artistically designing them. Eventually my creations jumped from their two dimensional confinement, requiring the solver to dive through holes to the other side, or fold part of the paper over, then right back again. At around the age of eight, I invented a way for mazes to carry binary-encoded messages, with left turns and right turns representing 0s and 1s. This evolved into a base-3 maze on the surface of a tetrahedron, with crossing an edge representing a 2. For me, a blank piece of paper represented the freedom to explore new dimensions, pushing the boundaries of traditional maze making.
I found a similar freedom in mathematics. Here's what I wrote when I was 9:
N+B=Z
M^2=P
E-(L+B)=G
C/Y=Z-Q
B+B=Y
(D-V)^9-(P*L)=J
W=(I-V)^2
Y+B+C=R
O^2+(Y*O)=T
F^3-(T+W)=F^2
V-R=H-U
A^3-C=N
Y^2+B=L
J^2-J=J+(P+I)
Y^3=X
X-R=M-O
D*A-B-(V+Y)=E
U-X-O=W
P/P=B
S-A=U
(Z+B)*C=P
C(+/-)B=A
U+C=H
R-L=S-T
The object of puzzles like these was to solve for every letter, assuming they each represented a unique positive integer, and that both sides of each equation are positive. These are not typical assumptions for practical mathematics, and I didn't even need 26 equations. Upon formally learning algebra, I was dismayed that "proper math" operated under a different set of assumptions, that two variables can be equal, or be non-integers, and that you always need as many equations as variables. Yet looking back, I now see that mathematics was so inspirational because there really is no "proper" way, no convention to hold me from discovering a completely original method of thought. Math was, and still is, yet another way for me to freely express my creativity and different way of thinking without constraint.
It's all about freedom. The thoughts are there, they just need a way to escape. The greatest single advancement that delivered even more freedom was my first computer, and on it, one of the first computer games I ever played: "Maze Madness." It was a silly and simple game, but I remember being awed that I could create my own levels. Through the years, I've made thousands (not exaggerating) of levels in a variety of different computer games. I get most excited when I discover a bug that I can incorporate to add a new twist to the traditional gameplay.
A few years ago I grew tired of working within the constraints of most internet games and I wanted to program my own, so I decided to learn the language of Scratch. With it, I created several computer games, incorporating such unordinary aspects of gameplay as the avoidance of time-travel paradoxes, and the control of "jounce," the fourth derivative of position with respect to time. Eventually, I came to realize that Scratch was too limited to implement some of my ideas, so I learned C#, and my potential expanded exponentially. I continue to study programming knowing that the more I learn, the more tools I have to express my creativity.
To me, studying computer science is the next step of an evolution of boundary breaking that has been underway since my first maze.
Tips + Analysis:
Show us where it all started. This essay is an origin story of sorts. It’s kind of like a mini-movie that shows us the development of the writer’s interests in computer science. Because of this, it features elements of both our montage and narrative approaches, not neatly fitting into either category (though leaning more to the montage side, using “mazes”—and other things that are maze-like, such as mathematics and CS—as a thematic thread). Normally, we suggest this “origin story” approach for people writing in response to the “why major?” supplemental essay prompt, but this writer makes it work for their personal statement. How? They go deeper into their examples than the tighter word limit of a supplemental essay would allow, and they also go broader with the essay’s implications: they frame their interest in computer science as a natural “evolution” of the “boundary breaking that has been underway since [their] first maze.”
Consider artifacts from your past. Before you even read the essay, your eye is drawn to that math maze. It functions as a kind of artifact; it’s not an example of what the writer WOULD create, but a literal recreation of what the writer CREATED when they were nine. It’s almost like the writer taped a photograph in the middle of the essay. But before you go digging through old family photos to find the one of you in the Harry Potter pajamas, consider why this works in this essay. Firstly, the writer is able to easily recreate it simply by typing it out. You can’t (yet) put images in your personal statement, so if you’re thinking about including “artifacts” in your essay, they’d need to be easily understood as text. Secondly, it’s a perfect example. As we touched on in the tip above, the writer’s goal here is to show us that they’ve been “breaking boundar[ies]” since they were young. The math maze isn’t a novelty included for its own sake, but organically arrived at “proof” of the writer’s overarching argument.
Walk the context-line. If you’re like us, when you think “maze,” you think about manicured hedges creating confusing patterns of travel. It becomes clear, though, that those aren’t the kinds of mazes this writer has in mind. This shift in thinking doesn’t really inhibit our understanding of the content though, does it? This is because the writer manages to provide just enough context that we can follow along without getting lost. The third sentence of the essay is a great example of this: “Eventually my creations jumped from their two dimensional confinement, requiring the solver to dive through holes to the other side, or fold part of the paper over, then right back again.” Phrases like “two dimensional” and “fold part of the paper,” clarify that when this writer talks about mazes, they’re not talking about hedges. Rather, they’re talking about puzzles created with pieces of paper. The clarification is economical, as they never give us a sentence that says something to the effect of this: whereas many people think of mazes as things you walk through, I’ve created mazes out of paper since I was a kid. They don’t give us that sentence because they don’t need to. They fill us in along the way, and are thus able to save their word count to develop bigger ideas rather than getting bogged down in clarification.
I am [Student’s name]. I was named after my father and grandfather. I was born, raised and currently reside in the Phoenician city of Sidon, a port city in the south of Lebanon along the Mediterranean. I was raised speaking Arabic and, at age 6, I began attending French Community School where the language of instruction is French. Thus, English is my third language.
While I have been fortunate in many ways, I have had my share of challenges growing up in Lebanon. In 2006, I witnessed my first war, which broke in the south of Lebanon and resulted in the displacement of thousands of people into my hometown. Hearing the bombs and seeing the images of destruction around me certainly impacted me. However, the greater impact, was working with my father to distribute basic aid to the refugees. I visited one site where three families were cramped up in one small room but still managed to make the best of the situation by playing cards and comforting each other. Working with the refugees was very rewarding and their resilience was inspiring. The refugees returned home and the areas destroyed were largely rebuilt. This experience showed me the power of community and the importance of giving back.
I am blessed with a family who has supported my ambitious academic and social pursuits. My parents have always worked hard to provide me with interesting developmental opportunities, be it a ballet performance at the Met, a Scientific Fair at Beirut Hippodrome, or a tour of London’s Houses of Parliament. Because of the value they placed on education, my parents placed me in a competitive Catholic school despite my family’s Muslim background. Today, my close friends consist of my classmates from various religious and social backgrounds.
In 2012 and 2013, I had the opportunity to attend summer programs at UCLA and Yale University. The programs were incredibly rewarding because they gave me a taste of the excellent quality and diversity of education available in the United States. At Yale University, my roommate shared with me stories about the customs in his hometown of Shanghai. Other experiences, such as the mock board meeting of a technology company to which students from different backgrounds brought in divergent business strategies, affirmed my belief in the importance of working toward a more inclusive global community. I believe the United States, more so than any other country, can offer a challenging, engaging and rewarding college education with opportunities for exposure to a diverse range of students from across the globe.
I intend to return to Lebanon upon graduation from college in order to carry on the legacy of my grandfather and father through developing our family business and investing in our community. My grandfather, who never graduated from high school started a small grocery store with limited resources. Through hard work, he grew his business into the largest grocery store in my hometown, Khan Supermarket. My father, who attended only one year of college, transformed it into a major shopping center.
Like my father, I grew up involved in the business and have a passion for it. I’ve worked in various roles at the store, and, in 2012, I worked on a project to implement an automated parking system, contacting vendors from around the globe and handling most of the project on my own from planning to organization and coordination. I enjoyed every bit of it, taking pride in challenging myself and helping my father.
My hard work has driven me to become the top-ranked student in my school, and I am confident that my ambition and desire to contribute to the community will ensure my success in your program. I look forward to learning from the diverse experiences of my peers and sharing my story with them, thus enriching both our learning experiences. And I look forward to becoming the first man in my family to finish college.
Tips + Analysis:
What makes for a good narrative topic? One of the more (most?) challenging parts of writing a personal statement is deciding what to write about. This essay features a topic that fulfills the two criteria we think make for an effective narrative topic: it features compelling challenges and great insight. In the context of college admissions essays, not many students are writing about experiences with war. Now, just because you may have not experienced war doesn’t mean you need to preclude yourself from writing a narrative essay. But do understand how a story about, say, not making the soccer team, may sound to an admissions officer who just read this essay. To be clear, we’re not saying that failing to make the soccer team was an easy experience for you. We are saying that it’s a topic that will be more difficult to stand out with. So if this essay checks the “compelling challenges” box, it checks the “insight” box by showing us how…
…the origins of the values prove motivation for future action. Ask yourself why the writer describes “[distributing] basic aid to the refugees” in his hometown. It’s an example of something, yes? But what does he want it to be an example of? Stuck? Look towards the end of that paragraph, where he writes that “This experience showed me the power of community and the importance of giving back.” Okay! So he wanted to give us an example of where his valuing “community” and “giving back” came from. Later on in the essay, do you ever get the sense that “community” and “giving back” has to do with what he hopes to do in the future? Take a look at the fifth paragraph. There, he writes that he “intend[s] to return to Lebanon upon graduation from college in order to carry on the legacy of [his] grandfather and father through developing [their] family business and investing in [their] community.” See the development there? Obviously, a bunch of necessary things happen in the middle, but by focusing on those two moments we see the “aha!” behind the insight: his experiences distributing aid were the origins of his core values, which clearly relate to what he hopes to do in the future.
Ending by returning to the beginning. At first, it may feel like the writer tells us about his name simply to give us a bit of background on himself. But his ending digs a bit deeper into his name, doesn’t it? Opening by telling us that he was “named after [his] father and grandfather” creates an immediate connection to those two male role models in his life. He ends the essay by clarifying a key aspect of this connection: he wants to “carry on the legacy of [his] grandfather and father” by “becoming the first man in [his] family to finish college.” So his ending isn’t simply him restating that he was named after his father and grandfather, but rather an expansion on the significance of that fact.
As a kid I was always curious. I was unafraid to ask questions and didn’t worry how dumb they would make me sound. In second grade I enrolled in a summer science program and built a solar-powered oven that baked real cookies. I remember obsessing over the smallest details: Should I paint the oven black to absorb more heat? What about its shape? A spherical shape would allow for more volume, but would it trap heat as well as conventional rectangular ovens? Even then I was obsessed with the details of design.
And it didn’t stop in second grade.
A few years later I designed my first pair of shoes, working for hours to perfect each detail, including whether the laces should be mineral white or diamond white. Even then I sensed that minor differences in tonality could make a huge impact and that different colors could evoke different responses.
In high school I moved on to more advanced projects, teaching myself how to take apart, repair, and customize cell phones. Whether I was adjusting the flex cords that connect the IPS LCD to the iPhone motherboard, or replacing the vibrator motor, I loved discovering the many engineering feats Apple overcame in its efforts to combine form with function.
And once I obtained my driver’s license, I began working on cars. Many nights you’ll find me in the garage replacing standard chrome trim with an elegant piano black finish or changing the threads on the stitching of the seats to add a personal touch, as I believe a few small changes can transform a generic product into a personalized work of art.
My love of details applies to my schoolwork too.
I’m the math geek who marvels at the fundamental theorems of Calculus, or who sees beauty in A=(s(s-a)(s-b)(s-c))^(1/2). Again, it’s in the details: one bracket off or one digit missing and the whole equation collapses. And details are more than details, they can mean the difference between negative and positive infinity, an impossible range of solutions.
I also love sharing this appreciation with others and have taken it upon myself to personally eradicate mathonumophobiconfundosis, my Calculus teacher’s term for “extreme fear of Math.” A small group of other students and I have devoted our after-school time to tutoring our peers in everything from Pre-Algebra to AP Calculus B/C and I believe my fluency in Hebrew and Farsi has helped me connect with some of my school’s Israeli and Iranian students. There’s nothing better than seeing a student solve a difficult problem without me saying anything.
You probably think I want to be a designer. Or perhaps an engineer?
Wrong. Well, kind of.
Actually, I want to study Endodontics, which is (I’ll save you the Wikipedia look-up) a branch of dentistry that deals with the tooth pulp and the tissues surrounding the root of a tooth. As an Endodontist, I’ll be working to repair damaged teeth by performing precision root canals and implementing dental crowns. Sound exciting? It is to me.
The fact is, it’s not unlike the work I’ve been doing repairing cellphone circuits and modifying cars, though there is one small difference. In the future I’ll still be working to repair machines, but this machine is one of the most sophisticated machines ever created: the human body. Here, my obsession with details will be as crucial as ever. A one millimeter difference can mean the difference between a successful root canal and a lawsuit.
The question is: will the toothbrushes I hand out be mineral white or diamond white?
Tips + Analysis:
A clear claim, supported by comprehensive examples. Here’s an essay that states one of its core arguments early on: the writer has always been “obsessed with the details of design.” A key goal of the paragraphs following that claim is to show readers what detail-obsession looked like for this writer, specifically. They pull on varied examples to accomplish this goal, showing us everything from their obsession over what shade of white to use for a shoe to their stitching threads on car seats. Notice how these examples come from different parts of the writer’s life. Starting all the way back in second grade, they focus on different moments from their life in chronological order that show something about their detail-oriented mindset. The result is that we understand not simply that the writer is “obsessed with the details of design,” but that they have always been this way.
A career can lead to your thread. The core of a montage essay is its guiding thread, the idea that ties all the examples together. Later on in the essay, it becomes clear that this writer has a confident sense of what career they want to pursue: endodontics. But the thread of this essay isn’t exactly endodontics itself—rather, they use various qualities they think are vital to the work of an endodontist—like obsession over details and compassion—as the guiding thread. Tying together their examples in this way makes clear to readers how informed this writer is about their aspirations, while allowing for some surprise with the ending (more on that in a sec). They know key characteristics an endodontist must have, and have deeply reflected on how they embody those characteristics.
Addressing the reader requires finesse. Toward the end of the essay the writer does something so confidently and seamlessly that you may not have stopped to consider how unique it was: they address the reader. What? They did? You may be asking. Yes, they did: “You probably think I want to be a designer. Or perhaps an engineer?” (bold added). So what? You may be asking. Well, we’ve seen a lot of essays where this kind of thing doesn’t work. In an effort to be cheeky and coy, writers put their foot in their mouth asserting something about how the reader perceives them. The thing is that you need to be in total control of how you have presented yourself in order to make a move like this. This writer has that control. Readers are thinking that the writer would want to be an engineer or designer, and so the subtle move works, making the ending both surprising and, in hindsight, inevitable.
The clock was remarkably slow as I sat, legs tightly crossed, squirming at my desk. “Just raise your hand,” my mind pleaded, “ask.” But despite my urgent need to visit the restroom, I remained seated, begging time to move faster. You see, I was that type of kid to eat French Fries dry because I couldn’t confront the McDonalds cashier for some Heinz packets. I was also the type to sit crying in front of school instead of asking the office if it could check on my late ride. Essentially, I chose to struggle through a problem if the solution involved speaking out against it.
My diffidence was frustrating. My parents relied on me, the only one able to speak English, to guide them, and always anticipated the best from me. However, as calls for help grew, the more defunct I became. I felt that every move I made, it was a gamble between success and failure. For me, the fear of failure and disappointment far outweighed the possibility of triumph, so I took no action and chose to silently suffer under pressure.
Near meltdown, I knew something needed to be done. Mustering up the little courage I had, I sought ways to break out of my shell—without luck. Recreational art classes ended in three boring months. I gave up Self Defense after embarrassing myself in class. After-school band, library volunteering, and book clubs ended similarly. Continued effort yielded nothing.
Disillusioned and wrung dry of ideas, I followed my mom’s advice and joined a debate club. As expected, the club only reaffirmed my self-doubt. Eye contact? Greater volume? No thanks.
But soon, the club moved on from “how to make a speech” lessons to the exploration of argumentation. We were taught to speak the language of Persuasion, and play the game of Debate. Eventually, I fell in love with it all.
By high school, I joined the school debate team, began socializing, and was even elected to head several clubs. I developed critical and analytical thinking skills, and learned how to think and speak spontaneously.
I became proud and confident. Moreover, I became eager to play my role in the family, and family relations strengthened. In fact, nowadays, my parents are interested in my school’s newest gossip.
Four years with debate, and now I’m the kid up at the white board; the kid leading discussions; and the kid standing up for her beliefs.
More importantly, I now confront issues instead of avoiding them. It is exciting to discover solutions to problems that affect others, as I was able to do as part of the 1st Place team for the 2010 United Nations Global Debates Program on climate change and poverty. I take a natural interest in global issues, and plan to become a foreign affairs analyst or diplomat by studying international affairs with a focus on national identity.
In particular, I am interested in the North-South Korean tension. What irreconcilable differences have prompted a civilization to separate? Policy implications remain vague, and sovereignty theories have their limits—how do we determine what compromises are to be made? And on a personal level, why did my grandfather have to flee from his destroyed North Korean hometown--and why does it matter?
I see a reflection of myself in the divide at the 38th parallel because I see one part isolating itself in defense to outside threats, and another part coming out to face the world as one of the fastest- developing nations. Just as my shy persona before debate and extroverted character after debate are both part of who I am, the Korean civilization is also one. And just as my parents expect much from me, the first of my family to attend college, I have grand expectations for this field of study.
Tips + Analysis:
An image can tell your story. Here’s a statement the writer could have used to describe herself when she was younger: “I was shy.” But here’s the thing: a lot of other people could have written the same thing to describe themselves, too. General assertions like “I was shy”, “I am devoted to basketball” or “I am Catholic,” miss an opportunity to show readers more about you, specifically. This writer uses short, clear images to seize that opportunity. Take a look at the opening paragraph, where she says that she was the “type of kid to eat French Fries dry because I couldn’t confront the McDonalds cashier for some Heinz packets.” Now THAT’S a great way to show us what shyness looked like for this writer, specifically.
Expand the activity to other parts of your life. Your extracurriculars may be really important to you. The thing is, there are a few different places in your college application to show readers what you do in and outside of school (your activities list, for example). Because of this, you should think of the personal statement as a way to expand on, not simply repeat, what comes up in other parts of your application. It’s virtually guaranteed “debate club” is on this writer’s activities list. But you know what that writer probably couldn’t have included on that activities list entry? How debate led her to “[begin] socializing”, be the “kid up at the white board”, or become “eager to play [her] role in [her] family.” She’s using her personal statement to add nuance and context and meaning to her activities, not simply list the things she does.
What a good “going broad” ending can look like. An English teacher may have told you to end your analysis essays by “going broad.” Ours did. Here’s something you may be happy to hear: “going broad” is one way to end your personal statements, too. This writer does this to great effect, using the metaphor of the divide at the 38th parallel to refer to her own development throughout the essay. How can this work for you? Well, first you need to be clear on what you’re saying has changed about you in your own personal statement. Then you might ask yourself this question: where else in my life have I seen similar dynamics at play, either internally or externally? Reflecting on her Korean identity, this writer found the means to broaden the ideas of her essay to other contexts—and upleveled her writing nicely by doing so. | ||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 53 | https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/g19444830/famous-women-in-history/ | en | 65 Famous Women in History Who Changed the World | [
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"Quinci LeGardye",
"Ineye Komonibo",
"Brooke Knappenberger"
] | 2021-03-10T21:55:00+00:00 | Celebrate the most famous women in history by taking a look back at some of their biggest accomplishments. | en | Marie Claire Magazine | https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/g19444830/famous-women-in-history/ | Over the years, history has seen countless incredible women. We're talking about the kind of inspirational, powerful heroes who shook up the world as we know it. From women's rights activists and pioneers of racial equality to inventors, scientists, and world leaders, there are plenty of women throughout history who did the damn thing. So even though we're still often faced with blatant discrimination on the basis of sex, real progress has been made. For inspiration that'll drive you to make your own mark on the world, find inspiration in just some of the many women who shifted our culture in meaningful ways.
(If you're searching for more inspiration from badass women, we've gathered a list of female Black History heroes that have gone unsung, and for movie lovers, a list of the best feminist movies of all time.)
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Quinci is a Contributing Culture Editor who writes pieces and helps to strategize editorial content across TV, movies, music, theater, and pop culture. She contributes interviews with talent, as well as SEO content, features, and trend stories. She fell in love with storytelling at a young age, and eventually discovered her love for cultural criticism and amplifying awareness for underrepresented storytellers across the arts. She previously served as a weekend editor for Harper’s Bazaar, where she covered breaking news and live events for the brand’s website, and helped run the brand’s social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Her freelance writing has also appeared in outlets including HuffPost, The A.V. Club, Elle, Vulture, Salon, Teen Vogue, and others. Quinci earned her degree in English and Psychology from The University of New Mexico. She was a 2021 Eugene O’Neill Critics Institute fellow, and she is a member of the Television Critics Association. She is currently based in her hometown of Los Angeles. When she isn't writing or checking Twitter way too often, you can find her studying Korean while watching the latest K-drama, recommending her favorite shows and films to family and friends, or giving a concert performance while sitting in L.A. traffic. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 5 | https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-film-guide/thematic-filmography | en | Popular Themes and Tropes in Latinx Cinema | https://guides.loc.gov/ld.php?screenshot=bbcggcc.png&size=facebook&cb=1723734833 | https://guides.loc.gov/ld.php?screenshot=bbcggcc.png&size=facebook&cb=1723734833 | [
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"Dani Thurber"
] | null | This guide, curated through the Hispanic Reading Room, includes filmographies, interviews, filmmaker resources, and scholarship to help researchers navigate the complex histories of Latinx/Latine representation in the film industry. | en | https://www.loc.gov/favicon.ico | https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-film-guide/thematic-filmography | The thematic filmography section of the Latinx Representation in Film Research Guide is a curation of the various themes and perspectives found within Latinx cinema. It is increasingly difficult to categorize the powerful narratives and stories that comprise this extensive collection of films. The goal of this thematic filmography is to identify important films within Latinx cinema focused on specific recurring themes and provide an avenue for researchers to better understand Latinx representation. Each thematic section will open the door for the public to explore films that have had an impact on Latinx representation and shed light on the nuances of the Latinx lived experience. Some of the major recurring themes we identified when creating the Latinx Representation in Film Research Guide include the Borderlands, Finding Home, Latinx Biopics, History, Family, and Identity. This thematic filmography by themes will include 5-10 films specifically selected for each section. It will also highlight some of the incredible films from the directors we interviewed in our Cine Latine Interview Series (Coming Soon).
Cataloged films listed below will link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Please note that not all films listed below are part of the Library's collections. To access films part of the Library's moving image collections, please contact the Moving Image Research Center to confirm availability of film titles and the best way to gain access. As collections are stored off-site, advance notice is needed to prepare items.
Some of the recurring themes that we encountered when compiling our list of Latinx films were the themes of Finding Home and the Borderlands. Finding Home is a broad topic that can encompass the complexity of migration and navigating life as a Latinx in the United States. "Finding Home" can very much be in the literal sense by moving to another country, however, it can also describe a feeling of not belonging here or there. These stories and narratives provide a glimpse into the lived experiences and nuances of navigating cultural and physical barriers in the search for home. This also ties into our theme of the Borderlands and the vast array of stories that detail the complexity of navigating the physical border in the Southern United States. Surrounding communities have utilized cultural production like film to provide insight into how political borders have both divided and unified people. This unique geographical space contains powerful narratives that can relate to the Latinx immigrant experience all across the nation.
Latinx Biopics and Histories are crucial when considering Latinx representation in film. Narratives focused on a particular historical period or personality provide insight into how Latinx leaders and histories continue to be remembered through the medium of film. “La Bamba” (1987) and “Selena” (1997) highlight the cultural impact of Latinx music and its influence across the United States. These films provide a unique glimpse into the lives of renowned Latinx musicians and how their cultural legacy continues to live on today. The biopics of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerto share powerful and compelling perspectives from the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and their importance to American history. The “History” section of this thematic filmography is focused on films that are inspired by historical events or of particular historical significance to Latinx cinema. “Walkout” (2006) directed by Edward James Olmos is based on the East Los Angeles student walkouts of 1968. These crucial moments in Latinx history are preserved and documented in Latinx cinema. A film like “West Side Story” (1961) contains immense cultural significance due to its depiction of social issues centering on Latinx characters and stories.
The Family section of the thematic filmography contains films that explore Latinx family dynamics and are primarily intended for younger audiences. A film like "Coco" (2017) provides a glimpse into the familial cultural practices associated with life and death in Mexican and Mexican-American communities. "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" (2018) is an animated superhero film where the main protagonist is an Afro-Latino teenager from New York City. The usage of Spanglish in this film and the ability for Latinx children to see themselves as a superhero highlights the importance of this type of representation in Latinx cinema. A film like "Father of the Bride" (2022 interrogates familial and cultural dynamics amongst a Cuban-American family as they prepare for a wedding. These depictions of the family and Latino protagonists on screen allow Latinx audiences to see their own family and cultural heritage reflected. This representation is particularly crucial to younger Latinx audiences as there has been a shift toward more inclusivity in children’s films in recent years. The theme of Identity explores a variety of different aspects of Latinx culture and the dynamics of identity formation within the United States. The film "Daughter of the Sea" (2022) is about a young Puerto Rican woman experiencing a spiritual awakening that draws her closer to her African and Indigenous roots on the island. This coming-of-age film utilizes Afro-futurism to tell a story about identity and the importance of connecting to ancestral traditions. "Mosquita y Mari" (2012) is a coming-of-age story about two Mexican-American women navigating their identity and sexuality. These films provide a nuanced perspective into the Latino lived experience and go beyond the mere representation of Latina/s/x(s) on screen. They share insightful stories about navigating identity formation as a Latina/o/x in the United States. | |||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 45 | https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-mandela-effect-4589394 | en | What Is the Mandela Effect? 20 Examples and Explanations | [
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Looking at the origin of the Mandela effect, some famous examples, as well as some potential explanations for this strange confluence of perceptions can help to shed light on this unique phenomenon.
Origins of the Mandela Effect
The term "Mandela Effect" was first coined in 2009 by Fiona Broome when she created a website to detail her observance of the phenomenon. Broome was at a conference talking with other people about how she remembered the tragedy of former South African president Nelson Mandela's death in a South African prison in the 1980s.
However, Nelson Mandela did not die in the 1980s in a prison—he passed away in 2013. As Broome began to talk to other people about her memories, she learned that she was not alone. Others remembered seeing news coverage of his death as well as a speech by his widow.
Broome was shocked that such a large mass of people could remember the same identical event in such detail when it never happened. Encouraged by her book publisher, she began her website to discuss what she called the Mandela Effect and other incidents like it.
Notable Examples of the Mandela Effect
The story of Nelson Mandela is not the only example of this type of false group memory. As the concept of the Mandela Effect grew along with Broome's website, other group false memories began to emerge.
Henry VIII Eating a Turkey Leg
People had a memory that the above portrait of Henry VIII featured him eating or holding a turkey leg, though no such painting has ever existed. There have, however, been similar cartoons created. This may be related to the common knowledge of Henry VIII as a large man.
Luke, I Am Your Father
If you saw Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back, you probably remember Darth Vader uttering the famous line, "Luke, I am your father" in the pivotal scene near the end of the film.
You might be surprised to learn, then, that the line was actually, "No, I am your father." Most people have memories of the line being the former rather than the latter, and it is commonly quoted incorrectly.
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
If you watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, you probably remember the line, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" As you can see from the above subtitled screenshot, the line actually began with the phrase "Magic mirror on the wall" instead. It probably doesn't help matters that Julia Roberts and Lily Collins starred in a 2012 live-action film based on Snow White called "Mirror Mirror"!
Oscar Meyer or Oscar Mayer?
There is some controversy over the spelling of the famous brand of hot dogs, Oscar Mayer weiners. Some people claim to remember the brand being spelled "Meyer" instead of "Mayer," which is the correct spelling.
To be fair, the brand pronunciation is a closer match for the "Meyer" spelling, while "Mayer" is often pronounced differently, as in the musician John Mayer's name.
Location of New Zealand
Where is New Zealand in relation to Australia? If you look at a map, you will see that it is southeast of the country. However, there is a community of people who claim to remember New Zealand being northeast instead of southeast.
Berenstein Bears
The famous children's book series the "Berenstain Bears" created by Stan and Jan Berenstain is not immune to the Mandela effect. Many people report remembering the name being the Berenstein Bears (spelled with an "e" instead of an "a").
This is similar to the Oscar Mayer issue and hints at perhaps an underlying cognitive reason for the Mandela Effect instead of parallel realities, as some people believe.
Shazaam, Starring Sinbad?
One of the most well-known examples of the Mandela Effect is the collective memory of a movie called "Shazaam" that starred the actor/comedian Sinbad in the 1990s.
In fact, no such movie exists, although there was a children's movie called Kazaam starring Shaquille O'Neal, and some other coincidences that could help to explain how this movie became created (or remembered) in many people's minds. Even more confusing, there is now a movie series based on the DC Comics superhero Shazam—though it does not star Sinbad.
Pikachu's Black-Tipped Tail
Many people report remembering Pikachu, a Pokémon character, as having a black-tipped tail. In reality, the character has always had a solid yellow tail. The confusion or false memory may stem from the fact that Pikachu, as you can see, does have black-tipped ears.
Mickey Mouse's Suspenders
Mickey Mouse might be the most famous cartoon character in the world, but even Disney's famous mouse is often misremembered in the minds of fans. People often report the character wearing suspenders when he does not. The original Mickey is wearing shorts, but is completely unclothed on the top half of his body—how scandalous.
Sally Field's Famous Oscar Speech
When Sally Field won an Oscar in 1985, her acceptance speech included the oft-repeated, oft-parodied line "You like me, you really like me!" Except, what she actually said was "I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me."
Children of the '90s probably owe their false memory to Jim Carrey's parody of the line in his film The Mask, when his character utters the line "You love me, you really love me" in clear homage to Field's speech.
No, Really, It's Not Looney Toons
Yes, the Looney Tunes are in fact cartoons, not cartunes. And yes, you may remember watching the next generation of characters on a TV show called Tiny Toon Adventures. Nonetheless, the original show was Looney Tunes, not Looney Toons, as a companion to Merrie Melodies.
Jiffy Peanut Butter
There is Jiffy Lube, there's Jiffy Pop popcorn, there's Skippy peanut butter, and you may be able to whip up a PB&J in a jiffy, but no, there is no such thing as Jiffy Peanut Butter. It is and has always been Jif, though many people would swear to the contrary.
Curious George's Tail
This one is, well, curious. The assumption is that Curious George is a monkey, and most monkeys are understood to have tails. Many remember Curious George having a tail, but alas, everyone's favorite curious primate is in fact tailless. We hope this hasn't caused George any kind of existential crisis.
What the Heck Is a Froot Loop?
You can thank Kellogg's for this entry in the weird spelling section of the Mandela effect catalog. While the very well-known cereal is supposedly fruit-flavored, they decided to lean into the loops and double up on the double O's, opting for Froot Loops instead of Fruit Loops, much to our surprise.
Fruit of the Loom's Logo
You may not be able to identify every piece of fruit in the logo for the clothing brand Fruit of the Loom, but everybody at least knows that there is a cornucopia behind all the fruit, right? Wrong! Just ask the company itself—there is no cornucopia, even if we all remember it.
C-3PO's Leg Is What?
That's right, C-3PO, the famed Star Wars droid, has a silver right leg, but we won't blame you for getting this one wrong. Given the lower resolution of older films, the character often being shot from the waist up, and the fact that the original line of toys featured an all-gold C-3PO, it's no surprise how surprising it is to discover he had a silver leg all along.
"Play It Again, Sam"...Or Not
"Casablanca" is one of the most famous films of all-time. And while, many decades later, more and more people have not seen it, what is nonetheless known is the famous line "Play it again, Sam." Unfortunately, if you are familiar with that line, you may be confused to learn that it was never actually said in that exact way in the film. Ingrid Bergman's character does, however, say "Play it once, Sam." Adding to the confusion may be that Woody Allen made a film in 1972 called "Play It Again, Sam" about a film critic obsessed with "Casablanca".
It's a Beautiful Day...Where?
Hollywood contributed to the Mandela effect when the 2019 Mister Rogers biopic was named "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," a reference to the opening line of the famous song that opened every episode of Fred Rogers' show—"It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood." In reality, however, the song opens with the line "It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood."
Mr. Monopoly's Monocle
Rich Uncle Pennybags aka Mr. Monopoly sure seems like the type to wear a monocle. But in reality, the leading man of the board game everyone has played but nobody has ever finished can see just fine without a monocle. The leading theories are that we mistake him for the monocled Mr. Peanut. Oddly, there is yet another Jim Carrey connection as well—a scene in Ace Ventura 2 features the pet detective encountering a monocled man he refers to as "The Monopoly Guy."
Explanations for the Mandela Effect
So why would this effect even happen? Let's explore.
False Memories
A more likely explanation for the Mandela effect involves false memories. Before we consider what is meant by false memories, let's look at an example of the Mandela effect as it will help us to understand how memory can be faulty (and may lead to the phenomenon that we are describing).
Who was Alexander Hamilton? Most Americans learned in school that he was a founding father of the United States of America but that he was not a president. However, when asked about the presidents of the United States, many people mistakenly believe that Hamilton was a president. Why?
If we consider a simple neuroscience explanation, the memory for Alexander Hamilton is encoded in an area of the brain where the memories for the presidents of the United States are stored. The means by which memory traces are stored is called the engram and the framework in which similar memories are associated with each other is called the schema.
So when people try to recall Hamilton, this sets off the neurons in close connection to each other, bringing with it the memory of the presidents. (Though this is an oversimplified explanation, it illustrates the general process.)
Confabulation
Confabulation involves your brain filling in gaps that are missing in your memories to make more sense of them. This isn't lying, but rather remembering details that never happened. Confabulation tends to increase with age.
Misleading Post-Event Information
Information that you learn after an event can change your memory of an event. This includes event subtle information and helps to explain why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable.
Priming
Priming describes the factors leading up to an event that affects our perception of it. Also called suggestibility and presupposition, priming is the difference between asking how short a person is, versus how tall a person is. Saying, "Did you see the black car?" instead of "...a black car?" makes a subtle suggestion that influences response and memory.
Alternate Realities
One theory for the basis for the Mandela effect originates from quantum physics and relates to the idea that rather than one timeline of events, alternate realities or universes may be taking place and mixing with our timeline. In theory, this would result in groups of people having the same memories because the timeline has been altered as we shift between these different realities.
You aren't alone if you think this sounds unrealistic. Unfortunately, the idea of alternate realities is unfalsifiable, meaning there is no way to disprove that these other universes don’t exist truly.
This is why such a far-fetched theory continues to gain traction among the Mandela effect communities. You can't prove it's not real, so you can't discount the possibility of it. For many people, the excitement of a bit of mystery in everyday life also likely comes into play.
The Internet's Impact
The role of the internet in influencing the memories of the masses should not be underestimated. It's probably no coincidence that consideration of the Mandela effect has grown in this digital age.
The internet is a powerful way to spread information, and with this spreading of information comes the potential for misconceptions and falsehoods to gain traction. People then begin to create communities based around these falsehoods and what was once in the imagination starts to seem factual.
In fact, in a large study of over 100,000 news stories discussed across Twitter, conducted over a period of 10 years, showed that hoaxes and rumors won out over the truth every time by about 70%. This wasn't the result of manipulation or bots either—real verified accounts of real people were responsible for spreading false information at a much higher rate than the truth.
As each person chimes in with their own experience or memory of an event, those false memories could affect the memories of other people, thus coloring them to remember the events in the same way.
For example, Sinbad did star in other movies in the 1990s and appeared in a movie poster for the film "Houseguest" coming out of a mailbox (this looked similar to a genie, which could explain the association with the movie "Shazaam"). Sinbad also dressed up like a genie for an event that he hosted in the 1990s.
When one person mentioned this movie "Shazaam" (likely on the internet), it altered the memories of other people who tried to recall the movies that Sinbad made from the 1990s. Online communities spread this information until it appeared to be factual.
This explanation is supported by evidence that remembering something repeatedly builds your confidence in the memory even if it grows more inaccurate over time. As more and more people provided incorrect details, these become incorporated into other people's memories as facts and strengthened their conviction that they were correct.
The Mandela effect continues to be hotly debated, despite reasonable evidence that it is more likely explained in terms of the fallibility of human memory than some form of parallel universes at work.
Of course, we don't know everything. As more incidents of the Mandela effect continue to occur, perhaps more research into the origins will shed light on the causes. | ||||
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American Eccentric CinemaYears activeEarly-1990s–presentLocationUnited StatesInfluences
New Hollywood
Art film
Experimental film
Independent Film
American eccentric cinema is a mode of contemporary American filmmaking that emerged in what has been termed the metamodern or new sincerity. Its attachment to indie cinema has led some to consider it a movement and genre of cinema in the United States. Its key filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and Spike Jonze, are at times referred to as the "American Eccentrics". It occurred during the 1990s and 2000s, when indie directors sought to create films that diverted from the style and content of Hollywood franchise films.[1] American eccentric cinema came in opposition to the mainstream ideas of formulaic narratives[2] and the digitisation within films and new technologies that came about during the time period.[3] American eccentric cinema is marked by films that are "deeply concerned with ethics and morality, the obligations of the individual, the effects of family breakdown, and social alienation."[3]
Background
[edit]
American eccentric cinema was critically conceived in response to traditional Hollywood and films of popular culture[1] which often had clear, predictable characters and narratives. American eccentric cinema has been framed as influenced by the new Hollywood era.[1] Both traditions have similar themes and narratives of existentialism and the need for human interaction.[1] New Hollywood focuses on the darker elements of humanity and society within the context of the American Dream in the mid-1960s to the early 1980s.[1] with themes that were reflective of sociocultural issues and were centered around the potential meaninglessness of pursuing the American Dream as generation upon generation motivated to possess it.[1] In comparison, American eccentric cinema does not have a distinct context, its films show characters who are very individual and their concerns are very distinct to their own personalities.[1] American eccentric cinema is considered a shift in contemporary American cinema in the 1990s and 2000s driven by metamodern philosophical and moral beliefs. Far Out Magazine critic Swapnil Dhruv Bose writes that, "As a response to the suffocating excesses of the mainstream, many directors sought to examine the alienation imposed by modernity through fresh perspectives and unconventional methods. Although the creative consciousnesses of the artists vary to a great extent, their works have been collectively labelled as the 'American Eccentric Cinema' movement".[4]
American eccentric cinema is also known as "American smart cinema",[5] a tradition delineated by Jeffrey Sconce and Claire Perkins. Both film traditions consist mostly of American indie films from the 1990s and 2000s and have similar aesthetic strategies, particularly a focus on irony. However, as Kim Wilkins notes, despite the crossovers between the two forms of cinema, American eccentricity "uses irony not primarily for its tonal qualities but, rather, for dramatic and thematic functions".[6]
At a period of American history where postwar communities were growing older, many ideals were being re-evaluated and looked at critically in American eccentric cinema.[3] The genre's films look at emotions and where they come from as well as expectations for what a happy life should be.[3] American eccentric cinema sees happiness as not necessarily being in a domestic life; in a marriage or family. The filmmakers of the genre were influenced by their own lives where their perception of the domestic world could include feelings and emotions of "abandonment, alienation and frustration".[3]
The film tradition also takes influences from postmodernism through the movement's attitudes of irony and sensations of "detachment" to society.[1] But while filmmakers of American eccentric cinema position themselves in a critical manner, they also strive to create significant and unique art forms through various techniques and film features employed.[1]
Films of American eccentric cinema were also made before, during and after the September 11 attacks, when social desires were primarily concerned with being safe and secure.[3] At this time the rights and principles of American liberalism were being challenged and ideas of existentialism were common within art.[3]
Characteristics
[edit]
While American eccentric cinema films have distinct individual and stylistic visions, they share common themes and textual practices. American eccentric cinema is concerned about an individual's internal dilemmas and existentialism as a human being, regardless of the context.[3] The film techniques of the genre use aspects of mainstream cinema but alter the mainstream conventions slightly through characterisation, tone and style.[3] American eccentric cinema is also known for its use of inter-textual references, quotations and irony.[3] By doing this, an audience's expectation of what may happen is subverted.[3] Filmmakers go into the depth of a protagonist's journey finding their sense of self as the narrative.[3]
American eccentric cinema falls within independent cinema culture .[1] Independent cinema are types of films whose conventions oppose Hollywood mainstream sensibilities[7] with characteristics such as no "forward-moving narrative drive" where the structure is not as ordered or bound by a sense of needed fast pace.[7] Characters in eccentric cinema divert from those in mainstream Hollywood, which are comprehensible[7] with journeys having a distinct beginning, complicated middle and happy ending. "Indie" characters, as well as American eccentric cinema characters, do not necessarily have goals to achieve in the films, or feel defined by them, and a sense of strength of morality may not be as present.[7]
This type of cinema has been called "quirky", "cute" and "smart".[8]
There are many alternate methods of exploring romantic love and sexuality within American eccentric cinema. The films explore gender roles as changing and often take a postfeminist stance.[3] Characters often challenge and explore the expectations of marriage prior to the 1990s within the narrative as well as the complexities of sex and how society views it.[3] Most characters are heterosexual and the complications of love are dealt with from the man-woman relationship perspective.[3] However, director Todd Haynes, whom Swapnil Dhruv Bose labels a pioneer of the American eccentric movement,[9] comes as an exception as he explores LGBT relationships with films that were part of the beginning of the new queer cinema movement.[3] In his 1995 acclaimed drama, Safe, he commented on self-help culture as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s.[10]
Race is not explored as prevalently within American eccentric films.[3] According to Jesse Fox Mayshark portrayals of characters of a different race, that is, not white, are categorised within a "comic ethnic type".[3] Mayshark perceives lack of diversity as a direct correlation within the genre's directors being primarily white Americans who may think of "other races and cultures" as only outsiders, alien in their comedic nature.[3] Kim Wilkins states that to date the politics and style of American eccentric cinema have been informed by the overwhelmingly white male middle-upper demographic of its key filmmakers. She writes "The focus in American eccentric films (like those in the 'smart' tendency) on 'white male urban sophisticates' situates them as a form of 'men's cinema', in Stella Bruzzi's terms. While neither existential anxiety nor irony is, in reality, the sovereign domain of white men, their cinematic articulation in the key films of the American eccentric mode, such as P.T. Anderson's Magnolia or Punch Drunk Love, David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees or films by Wes Anderson or Charlie Kaufman, has largely evolved as a form 'grounded in the relationship between, masculinity—its ideology as well as its representation—and aesthetics.' Indeed, many of these films position masculinity as bound to the inability to directly articulate anxiety. Thus, the use of irony in these films—both by characters and through aesthetic and formal strategies—is conveyed as a particularly masculine strategy; a means by which 'ugly' feelings can be repackaged as intellectual gameplay while simultaneously begging to be recognized for what it truly is."[11] She goes on to note that the focus on white, urban, heterosexual men in American eccentric cinema adds to its relationship with neoliberalism: "It cannot be ignored that the protagonists of American Eccentric films are not only male but, on the whole, tend come from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds. The socioeconomic (and gendered) status of these characters situates them as those most likely to succeed within capitalist systems. Unlike indie films within realist modes, such as the neorealist works of Kelly Reichardt or Sean Baker, American Eccentric Cinema does not tend to portray characters at crossroads where decisions made or changing circumstances have the capacity to fundamentally affect their livelihoods, safety, or personal agency. Often the absurd narrative goals of characters are only possible within these films because these characters are not beholden to the financial imperatives that drive more naturalistic characters toward what may be considered more realistic goals."[12]
Politics are explored within the films, through the characters and their journeys.[3] Rather than preaching political messages and creating controversial debates about political issues, they create subtle means to explore politics.[3] Major events such as the September 11 attacks meant that the sense of American uncertainty that was pervading the national was reflected in themes such as self-doubt and insecurity within the characters.[3]
Interpretations on defining the genre
[edit]
Scholars Kim Wilkins and Jesse Fox Mayshark have written extensively on American eccentric cinema and its place within film genre in their books American Eccentric Cinema[1] and Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film.[3]
Wilkins, a film scholar at the University of Oslo, maintains that American eccentricity is a mode rather than a genre.[13] She demarcates five criteria for the American eccentric mode: "1: The presence of allusion, parody, and intertextuality formally (in terms of genre and meta-cinematic depiction) and playfulness/cinephilia; 2: Sincere thematic underpinnings that are presented at a distance due to the film's perceived 'quirkiness', amusing occurrences, and/or absurd aesthetic; 3: A form of ironic expression that is both reflexive and sincere; 4: Characters and cinematic worlds that are designed to encourage audience alignment despite being clearly constructed; and, above all, 5: Effective and intellectual engagement with an experience of existential anxiety". Wilkins analyses these textual tactics through four analytic lens—genre (with a focus on the road film), characterization, hyper-dialogue, and eccentric worlds. Although Wilkins states that American eccentricity is not an auteurist demarcation, she pays particular attention to the films of Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson.[14] Wilkins explains that there is a distinct relationship between neoliberalism and American eccentric cinema.[1] Neoliberalism is a set of principles proposing "that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and skills".[15] In a neoliberal world, the person will constantly be shifting and altering facets of their life such as expertise and abilities and even their own sense of self to keep up with what is happening within the economy.[16] Within American eccentric films, this idea of neoliberalism aligns to the films' desires to portray individuals as their own selves rather than purely "national or community citizens".[1] Wilkins states that because of this, and individuals not belonging in a community, it provides a foundation for many existential tensions and anxieties that are explored in the films.[1] Thus, she concludes that American eccentric cinema responds to neoliberalism, as well as the existential concerns that were present during the new Hollywood era through means that are presented as ahistoric and primarily concerned with the characters' own experiences rather than broader socio-cultural or political concerns.[1]
Mayshark, an editor at the New York Times, [17][3] writes on American eccentric cinema filmmakers and analyses specific films within the genre. Mayshark says that the group of filmmakers were not explicitly categorised within any genre at the beginning of the movement because their films were extremely niche and individual, with varying styles and conventions. Their work defied convention and saw a new-found exploration of dark human themes through being idiosyncratic and individual.[3] They wanted the audience to feel like they were a part of the stories and have a "transcendent connection".[3]
As technologies emerge so to have discussions surrounding the expansion of the independent cinema genre and subsequently, American eccentric cinema. In a 1999 keynote address at the Independent Spirit Awards, in California, screenwriter and film producer, James Schamus "voiced the common concern that" commercial and major studios' "empires would ultimately threaten the existence" of independent cinema.[18] "In Schamus' evaluation, independent film is...in decline" however, other commentators see evolution and cultural "transition...to give way to new and different possibilities."[18]
List of notable films
[edit]
Title Year Director Marie Antoinette[19] 2006 Sofia Coppola Closer to Home (film)[20] 1995 Joseph Nobile Bottle Rocket[3] 1996 Wes Anderson Boogie Nights[3] 1997 Paul Thomas Anderson Slacker[3] 1990 Richard Linklater Dazed and Confused[3] 1993 Poison[3] 1991 Todd Haynes Safe[3] 1995 Spanking the Monkey[3] 1994 David O. Russell Flirting with Disaster[3] 1996 Being John Malkovich[3] 1999 Spike Jonze Adaptation[3] 2002 Human Nature[3] 2001 Michel Gondry Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind[3] 2004 Fight Club[3] 1999 David Fincher Lost in Translation[3] 2003 Sofia Coppola Donnie Darko[3] 2001 Richard Kelly Your Friends & Neighbors[3] 1998 Neil LaBute The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou[3] 2004 Wes Anderson The Squid and the Whale[3] 2005 Noah Baumbach Citizen Ruth[3] 1996 Alexander Payne Election[3] 1999 About Schmidt[3] 2002 Sideways[3] 2004 Before Sunrise[3] 1995 Richard Linklater I Heart Huckabees[3] 2004 David O. Russell Waking Life[3] 2001 Richard Linklater Magnolia[3] 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson Velvet Goldmine[3] 1998 Todd Haynes Far From Heaven[3] 2002 Anomalisa[1] 2015 Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson Happiness[18] 1998 Todd Solondz Very Bad Things[18] 1998 Peter Berg Storytelling[18] 2001 Todd Solondz Welcome to the Dollhouse[18] 1995 In the Company of Men[18] 1997 Neil LaBute The Unbelievable Truth[18] 1989 Hal Hartley Trust[18] 1990 Henry Fool[18] 1997 Simple Men[21] 1992 The Ice Storm[18] 1997 Ang Lee 2 Days in the Valley[22] 1996 John Herzfeld Rushmore[22] 1998 Wes Anderson The Royal Tenenbaums[22] 2001 The Sweet Hereafter[22] 1997 Atom Egoyan Punch-Drunk Love[19] 2002 Paul Thomas Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel[19] 2014 Wes Anderson Damsels in Distress[23] 2011 Whit Stillman Juno[24] 2007 Jason Reitman Synecdoche, New York[25] 2008 Charlie Kaufman Lady Bird[26] 2017 Greta Gerwig The Darjeeling Limited[27] 2007 Wes Anderson Barcelona[28] 1994 Whit Stillman The Last Days of Disco[18] 1998 The Chumscrubber[18] 2005 Arie Posin Metropolitan[29] 1990 Whit Stillman The Savages[18] 2007 Tamara Jenkins Ghost World[18] 2001 Terry Zwigoff Clerks[30] 1994 Kevin Smith Palindromes[18] 2004 Todd Solondz
List of notable figures
[edit]
Filmmakers
[edit]
Wes Anderson[3][31]
Paul Thomas Anderson[3]
Richard Linklater[3]
Todd Haynes[3]
David O. Russell[3]
Charlie Kaufman[3]
Spike Jonze[3]
Michel Gondry[3]
David Fincher[3]
Sofia Coppola[3]
Richard Kelly[3]
Neil LaBute[3]
Todd Solondz[3]
Noah Baumbach[3]
Alexander Payne[3]
Peter Berg[18]
Hal Hartley[18]
Ang Lee[18]
John Herzfeld[22]
Whit Stillman[28]
Miranda July[32]
Lena Dunham[33]
Greta Gerwig[33]
Alex Ross Perry[34]
Mike Mills[34]
Jared Hess[35]
Jason Reitman[24]
Kevin Smith[30]
Actors
[edit]
Ben Stiller[3]
Mark Wahlberg[3]
Bill Murray[3]
Julianne Moore[3]
Jason Schwartzman[3]
Owen Wilson[3]
Luke Wilson[3]
Elliot Page[24]
Michael Cera[25]
Zooey Deschanel[25]
Frances McDormand[3]
Tilda Swinton[3]
Angelina Jolie[3]
Anjelica Huston[3]
Adrien Brody[3]
Adam Sandler[4]
Scarlett Johansson[4][36]
Legacy
[edit]
Rushmore, Slacker and Clerks were each inducted into the National Film Registry.[37]
Three films of Wes Anderson (Grand Budapest Hotel, Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom) alongside Before Sunset, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Far From Heaven and Synecdoche, New York were listed on the BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century.[38][39][40]
See also
[edit]
Alternative rock
Frat Pack
Generation X
Indiewood
Music videos
Slow cinema
Toronto New Wave
Transnational cinema | ||||
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] | null | [] | null | Women Film Pioneers Project is a scholarly resource exploring women’s global involvement at all levels of film production during the silent film era. | en | https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/how-women-worked-in-the-us-silent-film-industry/ | by Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal
Who Worked at What and When
This project began just after the centennial celebration of the motion picture, during a distinct turn to historiography in the field, and in the light of intriguing new evidence that continues to surface. We set out to prove that women were not just screen actresses in the silent era, in the two decades before the advent of synchronized sound motion pictures. Carrying over the impetus from the 1970s, we looked first for evidence that they had worked as directors but in the process we found that they had been not just directors. Women’s participation in the first two decades was both deeper and wider than previously thought. In addition to costume designer, as one might expect, the researchers on this project found, as one might not expect, camera operators as well as exhibitors (theatre owner and/or theatre manager). In her groundbreaking business history of women filmmakers in the silent era, Karen Mahar adds the colorist and the film joiner as well as the supervisor and the executive producer to this list.1 At first, many jobs were not necessarily gender-typed, she says. In the first decade, however, some departments became exclusively organized along gender lines, with editing or joining being the most visibly gendered work.
Yet the most comprehensive overview of the industry, Business Woman, in 1923 listed twenty-nine different jobs that women held (in addition to actress), including that of typist, stenographer, secretary to the stars and executive secretary, telephone operator, hairdresser, seamstress, costume designer, milliner, reader, script girl, scenarist, cutter, film retoucher, film splicer, laboratory worker, set designer and set dresser, librarian, artist, title writer, publicity writer, plasterer molder, casting director, musician, film editor, department manager, director, and producer.2
When Were Motion Pictures Silent?
Scholars date the advent of motion pictures from the first public Lumière Company cinématographe exhibition in Paris, France, on December 28, 1895, and in the United States, from the Edison Company’s New York City kinetoscope premiere on April 4, 1896.3 Yet, as Mahar has pointed out, the first years were defined by competition over equipment patents, the realm of men (2006, 25). The best way of explaining early opportunities for women is to first think of the growth spurt represented by the US nickelodeon boom, 1906–1909, which meant increased demand for short, one-reel films to screen at these storefront theatres. The influx of the women we are tracking begins around 1907—the year Gene Gauntier wrote a scenario at the Kalem Company based on Ben Hur, Florence Lawrence took a role in the Edison Company’s Daniel Boone; or, Pioneer Days in America, and Alice Guy Blaché, married three days, set sail for New York from Paris, as each recalls in a memoir (Gauntier Oct. 1928, 184; Lawrence 1914, 40; Slide, 1986a, 60-61).
Although 1927–1928 marks the official transition to sound years in the US, many of the titles we list were issued in both silent and sound versions.4 Titles after 1928 are included for other reasons. First, experimental and documentary work expand the definition of “silent film” because in the late 1920s and into the 1930s low-budget work was often shot silent with a nonsynchronous soundtrack added later, if at all. This allows us to consider, for instance, the extant 16mm print of the fourteen-minute A Journey to the Operations of the South American Gold Platinum Co., in Colombia South America (1937) made by anthropologist Kathleen Romoli, now in the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano in Bogotá. Or, we include the work of American experimental filmmaker Stella F. Simon, whose extant short Hände/Hands (1927–28) was restored by the Museum of Modern Art in 2001. Second, some women whose careers began in the silent era became more important in the sound era. Although she was a popular Mexican film actress in the silent era, Adela Sequeyro did not direct motion pictures until the 1930s, and two of the sound titles she directed are extant: Más allá de la muerte/Beyond Death (1935) and La mujer de nadie/Nobody’s Woman (1937).5 There was, however, no equivalent to Sequeyro in the United States.
No silent era US motion picture actress began another career phase directing in the sound era, although some writers began before 1927 and continued to work productively into the sound era. Latin American industry examples contrast here with the US industry, where, the evidence shows, the ranks of women working as scenario writer, director, or producer thinned out by 1923 (Mahar 2006, ch. 2 and 6). It is commonly asserted that by 1925 the only woman still working as a Hollywood studio system director was the now-celebrated lesbian Dorothy Arzner. Less exclusive focus on directors, however, opens up this territory. Certainly Wanda Tuchock was another woman to stay employed in Hollywood, as Anthony Slide pointed out early (Slide 1996, 136). But her 1934 credit is not for director but for codirector on Finishing School for RKO with George Nichols, Jr. Her first silent era credit is as continuity writer on the Marion Davies star vehicle Show People (1923), the treatment for which was written by Agnes Christine Johnston while Johnston was on the staff at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. One of her next assignments at MGM was as scenario writer for the all-black cast classic Hallelujah (1929), directed by King Vidor, who also wrote the story. Like hundreds of other titles in the silent to sound transition years, Hallelujah was released in both sound and silent versions. Motion picture titles that straddle two technological moments, such as John S. Robertson’s The Single Standard (1929), written by Josephine Lovett, and Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929), written by Sonya Levien and edited by Katharine Hilliker, call attention to the women whose careers began in the silent era and continued into the sound era: Lovett, Levien, Dorothy Yost, Sarah Y. Mason, Zoe Atkins, and Virginia Van Upp.
US Companies Outside Hollywood: 1915–1935
It is now well established that the phasing out of women paralleled the development of the motion picture business into the corporate studio system, in place by the mid-1920s. Yet the exceptions to the “over by 1925” rule are important.6 Many writers and most editors continued to work within the studio system, and a few companies started by Hollywood insiders remained, such as the Dorothy Davenport Reid company, Mrs. Wallace Reid Productions, operating from 1924 to 1929, and Leah Baird Productions, started with cool producer Arthur Beck, and lasting from 1921 to 1927.
Another economy is operative outside Hollywood, and thus we find women financing companies with family fortunes, organizational fund-raising, professional earnings, and divorce settlements. Some, like Madeline Brandeis, worked on the edge of Hollywood, where she started Madeline Brandeis Productions to produce educational shorts, operating between 1924 and 1929. A Midwesterner whose first film was produced in Chicago, Brandeis funded her first production with her settlement from the Omaha, Nebraska, Brandeis Dry Goods Store heir to whom she was married. A number of the short films Brandeis produced as part of the Children of All Lands series, distributed by Pathé, are extant.
Women such as Brandeis and Ruth Bryan Owen, who produced just a handful of films or even a single title, or whose involvement in film production took a secondary or, at best, equal place to other careers or to their roles as wives or mothers, might be understood as “mere dilettantes” or “amateurs.” The practice of overlooking them and their work is not restricted to standard histories of the silent motion picture era. The filmmakers themselves sometimes downplayed their own efforts as, for instance, Brandeis does when she describes her filmmaking as a “pastime” in an article tellingly entitled “Woman Makes Films for Fun.” This seemingly casual reference sheds some light on the conflicting imperatives that organized women’s abilities and desires to make motion pictures outside Hollywood, especially since, by the late 1920s, “outside” may have been the only place where they were able to continue working as filmmakers.
As a professional writer and lecturer, Osa Johnson continued to produce motion pictures after her husband’s 1935 death. The work of Frances Flaherty with her husband, Robert, considered the first American documentary maker, spans 1921–1932. Still photographer Nancy Naumburg made the 16mm titles Sheriffed (1934) and Taxi (1935) under the auspices of the Film and Photo League, the leftist New York collective. These initiatives have in common their nontheatrical distribution and their educational or political goals. While some ventures defined themselves as oppositionally outside Hollywood, others, such as the silent project The Flame of Mexico (1932), undertaken by a Washington DC diplomat’s wife, might be considered hybrid projects. Producer Juliet Barrett Rublee envisioned theatrical distribution for her tribute to the Mexican people, shot by a professional Hollywood crew. Thus, because The Flame of Mexico, a 35mm print of which surfaced in 2006, has such high production values, it is visually comparable to the Warner Brothers feature Juarez (1939) although the documentary sections remind us of Soviet avant-gardist Sergei Eisenstein’s footage for Que Viva Mexico (1932). Little research has been done on the earliest companies founded by women outside Hollywood, but Mahar mentions the Blaney-Spooner Feature Film Company in 1913, the Liberty Feature Film Company in 1914, and the company organized in 1914 by author and playwright Eleanor Gates, who was interested in adapting her own literary work for the screen (2006, 66).
Regional Producing and Directing: Before and Never Hollywood
Women’s productions were fostered by the distance from bottom line-oriented major production centers, and the number of locations they used suggest that they discovered more possibilities in region-centered filmmaking. In the first decade, when film production sprouted around New York before the exodus to the West Coast, however, there was no major production center. Recent interest in filmmaking in New Jersey calls our attention to the earliest, the Solax Company, founded by Alice Guy Blaché in 1910 in Ft. Lee. When Helen Gardner left the New York City studios of the Vitagraph Company in 1911, she started Helen Gardner Picture Players in Tappan-on-Hudson, New York. In recent years, three of her feature films, Cleopatra (1912), Sister to Carmen (1913) and A Daughter of Pan (1913) have been restored and screened. Beta Breuil made short motion picture melodramas in Rhode Island in 1915 and 1916, four of which are extant: My Lady of the Lilacs, Violets, Daisies, and Wisteria. A strong African-American community in Kansas City, Kansas, constituted a viable audience for filmmakers Tressie Souders and Maria P. Williams in an era of race-segregated theaters.
Regional history itself provided the impetus for another extant title, The Lost Colony (1921), commissioned by the state of North Carolina and directed by Elizabeth B. Grimball, recruited for the job from the New York theatre after she directed the “Lost Colony” pageant. Nell Shipman Productions (1921–1925) specialized in melodrama set in the North woods, taking dramatic advantage of the wildlife and rugged Priest Lake, Idaho, landscape. A representative sample of her shorts and features are extant, including the short White Water (1921), featuring an exquisitely photographed, tightly cross-cut river rescue scene that rivals D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920). Lost, however, is the Ruth Bryan Owen production Once Upon a Time (1922) shot in Coconut Grove and Key Biscayne, Florida, which stood in for mythical Arabia in a production the director-producer cast with local amateur theatre actors.
Immigrant Outsiders and Outside Insiders
Mexican-American actress Beatriz Michelena headquartered her 1917–1919 company, Beatriz Michelena Features, in San Rafael, California, north of San Francisco. One of the titles the company produced, Just Squaw (1919), is held by the Library of Congress along with earlier Western genre films in which she starred produced by other companies. In Oakland, another part of the Bay Area, Marion E. Wong started the Mandarin Film Company and worked as actress, director, scenario writer, and producer of The Curse of the Quon Gwon (1917), recently discovered and restored. An intriguing reference leads us to wonder what kind of unit Japanese-American Tsuru Aoki, wife of actor-producer Sessue Hayakawa, was working in since she is cited as having in 1913 begun a “company of players.”7 But ethnicity and immigrant status don’t map perfectly along inside/outside lines, leading us to consider some as outside-insiders. Alison McMahan reminds us that Alice Guy Blaché was an immigrant from France and convincingly interprets her extant The Making of an American Citizen (1913) in these terms (2002, 142). But unlike so many others, Blaché did not arrive poor. When she disembarked in 1907 she held $50,000 worth of Gaumont stock that she would sell to start the Solax Company in 1910 (2002, 76).
It has long been established that the immigrant Jews who founded the US motion pictures studios, all of them male, began in dry goods and entertainment because these were the avenues open to them. The case of immigrant Jewish women is the reverse of that of the men who became moguls. For women, the two vehicles to entry were acting and writing, and these worked in different ways. Actresses of Asian or Hispanic descent or those who had migrated from Eastern Europe made difference, exotic-tinged, work for as opposed to against them. In changing her name from Miriam Edez Adelaida Leventon to Alla Nazimova, a young girl from a Russian Jewish immigrant family borrowed an exotic-ethnic effect, but later, as a mysterious lesbian and political radical, her persona acquired new associations. Nazimova Productions, 1917–1921, operating inside Metro and later linked to United Artists, was an artistically “outside” gamble in which she finally lost the money she had invested.
In the silent era, European exoticism was also faked. Welsh immigrant Muriel Harding styled herself as Polish countess Olga Petrova and as a move for artistic control, started Petrova Pictures Corporation in 1917, outside the studio system (McMahan 2002, 180). Valda Valkyrien, the Danish actress born in Reykjavik, Iceland, adopted the aristocratic persona of Mademoiselle Valkyrien to help her career when she immigrated to the US. She found work at the Thanhouser Company and later announced the Valda Valkyrien Production Company, although the evidence that the company produced any films has yet to be found.
Writers Sonya Levien and Anzia Yezierska were both from poor Jewish families that emigrated from Russia and settled on the Lower East Side of New York City. Yezierska, a reluctant transport to Hollywood, wrote about her bitter disillusionment in Cosmopolitan magazine in an article that begins, “I was very poor. And when I was poor, I hated the rich.”8 Her collection of short stories was produced by Goldwyn Pictures as Hungry Hearts (1922), 16mm prints of which are held in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and the National Film and Television Archives in London. Frederica Sagor Maas, a second generation Jewish American born in the US in 1900, and blacklisted along with her husband in the 1950s, died January 5, 2012 at the age of 111.
One openly bisexual writer, Mary MacLane, became famous for her nonfiction The Story of Mary MacLane published in 1902 when she was only nineteen. She would sign a contract for several films with the Essanay Company, then in Chicago. Only one, however, was made, as Men Who Have Made Love to Me (1918), adapted by MacLane from her own short story and starring herself. The single film phenomenon is a pattern and marks another way insiders were outsiders. Temporary insiders were soon “outsiders,” and often on the verge of losing the precarious foothold they had established (sometimes as heads of companies or units within larger companies)—unless they achieved stardom as actresses or unless they were part of a powerful producing family. See “The Family System of Production.”
New York, California Before Hollywood, and Hollywood: 1907–1923
Women’s Work before It Was “Women’s Work”
Work on the early motion picture set was relatively flexible, and in 1908 acting and directing were jobs like any other, on a par with lab work (Jacobs 1975, 59).9 Gene Gauntier describes the Kalem Company ensemble work from 1907 to 1912 as a scramble in which she did almost every job (Gauntier 1928). Actress Florence Turner even did the accounting at the Vitagraph Company studio in Brooklyn, New York, according to Stuart Blackton’s memoirs. At the Famous Players-Lasky Company in California, writer Beulah Marie Dix, newly arrived from the East Coast in 1916, stood in as an extra, learned about the camera, and took care of the lights (Brownlow 1968, 276). Many, like Bradley King, moved up from the lowest rung jobs as stenographers.10 As Mark Cooper describes the layout of the new Universal City lot completed in 1915 in Los Angeles, it created a kind of “laboratory for gender experiment” facilitated by “physical mobility” on the set in contrast to the New York office hierarchy (Cooper 2010, 63). These conditions produced the phenomenon we call the “Universal Women,” the largest concentration of women who worked as directors, sometimes also as writers, actresses, and producers, from 1916 to 1921: Ruth Ann Baldwin, Grace Cunard, Eugenie Magnus Ingleton, Cleo Madison, Ida May Park, Ruth Stonehouse, Lule Warrenton, Lois Weber, and Elsie Jane Wilson.
The Family System of Production
Boundaries between family and business were often blurred, best exemplified by the position of Gertrude Thanhouser, listed on articles of company incorporation as primary company stockholder,who acted, wrote, and served as a Thanhouser Film Company executive. Lloyd Lonergan, Edwin Thanhouser’s brother-in-law, wrote roughly nine hundred Thanhouser scenarios, and his sister Elizabeth Lonergan wrote for the Biograph and Kalem companies (Azlant 1997, 241).11 The DeMille dynasty that begins with mother Beatrice deMille is well known, but she is noted less for the scenarios she wrote for the Lasky company. The paternalism of Cecil B. DeMille and his brother William deMille (spelled differently) benefited writers Jeanie Macpherson, Olga Printzlau, Beulah Marie Dix,and Clara Beranger, as well as executive secretary Gladys Rosson and editor Anne Bauchens. All had long tenures beginning in the 1910s when what became Paramount Pictures was the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Players and then the Famous Players-Lasky Company.
Scenario writer Lorna Moon’s illegitimate child with William deMille was adopted by his brother Cecil and his wife. Paula Blackton as director and actress was recruited along with her children in Vitagraph Company cofounder Stuart J. Blackton’s Brooklyn, New York, studio.Later in London, at Blackton Productions, Stuart Blackton gave daughter Marian Constance Blackton a valued place in production decisions as well as her start as a writer. Close working relationships fostered what could be called a “familial system of production,” which crossed and sometimes overrode the stages film historians have identified: the cameraman system, the director-unit system, and the central producer system of production.12
The motion picture set was also a newly gender-mixed workplace that fostered liaisons, and the married or romantically linked creative team was a norm. Going it alone was the exception. In the majority of these cases, however, the woman, not the man was “the ticket” since it was her stardom that commanded resources. See “The Star Name Company.” Men most often handled the money and business side in the partnership (Mahar 2006, 73). Historical evidence, however, challenges gender assumptions. We find men who were financially irresponsible (as in the case of the Victor Company started by Harry Solterer with Florence Lawrence) and women who demonstrated remarkable business acumen. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, recollects Mary Pickford at the meeting to form United Artists in 1919: “She knew all the nomenclature: the amortizations and the deferred stocks, etc. She understood all the articles of incorporation, the legal discrepancy on Page 7, Paragraph A, Article 27, and coolly referred to the overlap and contradiction in Paragraph D, Article 24.”13 he jury is still out, however, on the role that husband Herbert Blaché played in the dissolution of the Solax Company (1910–1922), which became Blaché American Features (1913–1914), effectively demoting Guy Blaché from company president to vice president (Mahar 2006, 73–76; McMahan 2002, 77, 121, 172–73).
The couple mode within the familial system was most likely a continuum, from the rocky liaisons undermined by infidelities to the collaborators-for-life, exemplified by teams whose contracts stipulated joint work, like writer-editor team Katharine Hilliker -H. H. Caldwell, who practiced job-sharing. See also “Women Scenario Editors”; “Scenario Writer to Screenwriter.” Mr. and Mrs. George Randolph Chester and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew gave their marital status names to production companies although of a very different kind since the Chesters were writers who attempted to produce only once (The Son of Wallingford, 1921). The Drews developed a married couple comic persona for their “Mr. and Mrs. Drew” series, precursor, Mahar says, of the domestic screwball comedy. Further Mahar raises the delicate issue of who did the work, suggesting that it was Mrs., not Mr. Drew who produced and directed the series within the Vitagraph Company (2006, 117).14 Anthony Slide writes that Alice Terry was known to have stepped in to finish directing scenes for husband Rex Ingram (1996, 130–31). In a 1922 interview Louella Parsons conducted with husband of writer Josephine Lovett, director John S. Robertson, he describes their relationship as the “work and play together” ideal personified by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Mary Pickford (Parsons 1922, 4). The fan magazine publicity that espoused an equal partnership ideal, however, creates a smoke screen around the circumstances. As Shelley Stamp explains in her critical analysis of the domestic discourse around directing-producing team Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, these relationships contained many ingredients.15 Countering the image of perfect partnership, however, is the evidence that Weber was the dynamo (Mahar 2006, 91–92). In many cases the separation of female from male partner in a creative team may be an artificial after-the-fact operation. Unofficial information that conflicts with published motion picture credits is indicated in the “Credit Report” note following the Archival Filmography and Not Extant Films at the end of each profile. The following list of working partnerships indicates that most were husband-wife relationships.
Domestic Relations
Fan magazine writers liked to point out exceptions to the rule that creative teams were husband-wife teams. Motion Picture Magazine had to tell readers that Francis Ford was not married to Grace Cunard, but that he had a “real wife,” as they put it—Mrs Elsie Van Name Ford—who wrote the stories he used in the independent productions he made after leaving Universal Pictures.16 But where the studios specialized in publicizing spouses, thus advertising the heterosexuality of creative personnel, the industry community was divided about children and upheld what might be called a “double standard” of domestic disclosure. In 1916, Photoplay, typically obtuse on the subject, stated the obvious—that in the screen industry, actresses were always “Miss” whether married or not. But the editors take to task those women who keep their children secret, referring to them as “queer movie mothers ashamed of their babies.”17 Researchers on this project confirm that there are relatively few contemporary references to children born to and raised by women working primarily as screen actresses. Writer Frances Marion in a 1958 interview later explained the practice of camouflaging not only pregnancy but child-rearing when she confirmed that “Husbands and babies had to be hidden in the background.” Marion thinks that Gloria Swanson was the first to dare to say that she was married and also that she was a mother.18 Still in 1958 terminated pregnancies and illegitimate children could not be mentioned and researchers have had to wait decades for “reveal all” autobiographies in order to begin studying the work-to-domestic relations ratio in these women’s emotional lives.19 The moral code, however, may have been more strict for actresses than for female scenario writers. A rare photograph of mother Sarah Y. Mason, who worked with Victor Heerman as a husband-wife writing team, plays on her double role dexterity. Also unusual is this image of parents and children not featured as a performing family. The photo of Dorothy Davenport Reid with husband Wally Reid and their children Betty and Wallace Reid, Jr., circulated as a publicity image after he tragically died as a consequence of morphine addiction in 1923 and she returned to work, visibly the suffering widow. Sometimes atypical units were featured in fan magazine articles as when the home life of Cleo Madison was filled in with a mother and the invalid sister she supported. A woman was single because she was divorced (as Madison) or in between husbands or lovers. She was single even if, especially if, she was in an established lesbian relationship like Dorothy Arzner and her partner Marion Morgan or writer Zoe Akins and actress Jobyna Howland. Researching these alliances requires us to look behind references to a woman’s “single” status or see the terms “companion” or “roommate” for the code words they really are. We learn to be sensitive to the references to serial relationships that point to gay and lesbian liaisons as, for instance, Anita Loos ’s mention in a 1938 letter to H. L. Mencken that Zoe Akins had a “new lover” (qtd. in Holliday 1995, 233).
What we want to know most of all is what went on inside the homes of Hollywood celebrities and their friends. Zoe Akins was noted for the parties she threw at her home at 6350 Franklin Avenue in Hollywood for guests such as Dorothy Arzner, director George Cukor, writer Somerset Maugham, and actress Billie Burke (once allied with Arzner). From a Cecil Beaton article in Vogue in 1931 we know that “the house shared by the Misses Zoe Akins and Jobyna Howland” was “full of the most exquisite objects, full of charming and literary personalities” (qtd. in Mann 2001, 74).
We can infer from the great number of exterior photographs of motion picture celebrity homes that fan magazines tantalized readers with these images. Photoplay made the connection between these exteriors and the domestic comfort of their interiors in a 1917 article. The publication of images of the homes of Marie Doro, Gladys Brockwell, Louise Glaum, Ruth Stonehouse, Mary Pickford, Bessie Barriscale, Tsuru Aoki, and Kathlyn Williams suggests that mansions and adorable bungalows were good publicity for their owners. Strangely, Photoplay dares to address the means by which these players were able to acquire the capital to buy luxurious homes, tying their earnings to the enthusiasm of fans in a reference to the “net proceeds of homage.”20 But fan magazine writers had to strain to make a connection between what looks like real estate advertising and the lives of favorites. To score a photograph of Nazimova standing outside her mansion in jodhpurs would have been a coup. Then again, the number of willing subjects reminds us of how many not only understood the motion picture advertising value of signs of wealth but also its diversionary function. Mabel Normand outside her home sitting in her chauffeur-driven limousine belies a life of scandal and chronic illness. The diversion of the home also promoted diversion itself as an ideal. Here, the aura of work-as-play enveloped writers as well as players. Highly paid Famous Players-Lasky scenario writer Beulah Marie Dix walking her dachshund in front of her luxurious Southern California stucco residence reassures readers that her work is not exactly work. One angle on the story about Dix (and a rationale for taking interior publicity photographs), might have been that she worked from home.
Whose Work: Credits and Uncredited Work
Male-female working partnerships raise the difficult question as to whether the female contribution was submerged or whether joint authorship had its own assumed standard. Collaboration was the norm in the first decade at the start of which all creative workers were uncredited. One early film historian would thus describe the development of the motion picture industry as moving from anonymous production to screen credit (Jacobs 1975, 121).21 Attribution, if there was any, was unofficial, as Eileen Bowser explains in her study of the 1907–1915 years. Credits were not advertised in trade papers until in 1911 when the Edison Company published relatively complete cast lists (actors, directors, authors) and around the same time a few companies placed cast credits in titles, as Bowser determined from examining surviving motion picture film prints (Bowser 1990, 118).22 The combination of early anonymity and the very conditions of collaboration in the case of creative couples can create some confusion. Following the Archival Filmography and Not Extant Films, contradictory records and retrospective corrections are referenced in the “Credit Report” note.
Director and/or Producer
The focus here on women directors is both a misnomer and a key. In her important introduction to the “Cinema as a Job” section of The Red Velvet Seat, Antonia Lant explains that, given the “fluctuation” of opportunities in this period, directing, the plumb job, is a “most sensitive indicator of job range” (562). That the trade press, fan magazines, and the women most involved also saw directing as a key indicator is borne out in what Lant terms the “debate” over the question of the female director. She finds that these public discussions kept alive the terms of the debates around women’s suffrage, terms that were echoed in the 1970s (568).23 One finds among the figures quoted here the position that women were not suited to direct (Lillian Gish, Alice Guy Blaché) as well as the position that women were uniquely suited to it (Clara Beranger, Lois Weber, June Mathis). Ida May Park espoused both positions at different times in her career (Denton 49; Park 335–37). Many have noted the apparent inconsistency between public statements and the responsibilities these women undertook, most notably directing, producing, and executive managing, and Lant reminds us to consider the historical moment in which these statements are made (562). Here we also emphasize the conditions under which women worked. For instance, the months in which Lillian Gish, in the absence of D. W. Griffith, acted as supervisor of the Mamaroneck, New York, studio, she also directed her only motion picture, the feature Remodelling Her Husband (1920). Richard Koszarski provides the information that the studio, the former Flagler estate, was under construction and the cameraman Gish relied upon was suffering from World War I shell shock (2008, 17).
The findings here indicate no perfect correspondence between directing or writing jobs and identification with feminism or even espousal of equality for women. A very few associated themselves with feminism (Sonya Levien, Adela Rogers St. Johns), and at least one first associated with and then disassociated herself from feminism (Olga Petrova). Surprisingly, one of the most unqualified statements on behalf of women’s equality comes in 1912 from Beatrice deMille, the mother of motion picture impresarios William and Cecil B. DeMille, and in her own right a powerful New York theatrical agent who became a scenario writer: “This is the woman’s age. I think it has come to stay. Every relation between the sexes has changed. Hereafter, no woman is going to get married without feeling that she is getting as much as she gives. This may sound… crude… but it expresses pretty clearly what I mean…. This theme ‘women’s equality’ lives very close to my heart.”24 We could take up this theme and claim the first two decades as a “Golden Age of Women in Cinema.” Or, we can approach the question with more caution since the evidence is not all in as yet.
The competing evidence of women’s own writings as well as other sources from the 1910s and 1920s point to an evolution of job terminology as well as of the jobs themselves. While Alice Guy Blaché would be called a “directrice,” she was also clearly a producer, beginning in France at the Gaumont Company and continuing in the US, where she was producer as well as president of the Solax Company, as Alison McMahan tells us in her definitive study (McMahan 2001, chs. 3 and 4). Consider as well the power of retrospective recollection in memoirs and later interviews to make claims as well as to issue disclaimers. Charlie Chaplin notoriously credited himself as director on Keystone Company films on which Mabel Normand was assigned as director.25 Terminology in addition to roles themselves was in flux, so there was no standard way of referring to a woman who stage-directed a one-reel motion picture production as Jeanie Macpherson, who in 1916 was referred to as a “directress,” did (Martin 95).
Often male as well as female directors were “picturizers,” and, ambiguously, just “producers.” Even the Universal Weekly, the company house organ, through the 1910s uses “director” and “producer” almost synonymously, Cooper finds. To complicate matters, a unit within a larger company (effectively a company within a company), might be headed by a “producer” or a “producing director,” he further explains (Cooper 2010, 40). Here, we have credited women who were involved in production companies as “producers” as a means of adding a facet to a career, understanding, however, that there is more variance under the term “producer” than under “director.” Karen Mahar has used the term “actor-producer” picked up below. See “The Star Name Company.”
Not only were “producing” and “directing” terminologically interchangeable, but the distinction between directing, acting, and writing was not always clear. As an actress who in 1917 would start a company, Petrova Pictures Corporation, Olga Petrova recalled in her memoir, Butter With My Bread, that in the “infancy” of the industry, written scenarios were conceived as well as abandoned by both director and actors. Here she describes the creative exertions of “Mr. K.,” the director who rewrites by enacting, and the ravishment of the heroine, an expectant mother, in a scene from an unnamed domestic melodrama:
Although the scenarios were always read to me for approval, it was quite possible for a director to change them out of all recognition as we went along. Members of the supporting cast rarely knew more of the piece than the episodes in which they appeared. These scenes were outlined by the director, but for the most part he left the dialogue to the imagination of the performer. As it was considered very amusing by some artists to try to break one another up, the dialogue, during the actual photographing of the scene, had very often nothing in common with the action. This was disconcerting enough, but the habit of a certain director of counting aloud between bellows through a megaphone, to “hop it up” or “ease it up,” was more disconcerting still. Very early in Mr. K’s direction I found the only way to combat this was to stop in the scene and beg his pardon for not having understood. This of course wasted considerable film, for we had to start all over again. Usually after the first day or so of the filming of a story, Mr. K would discard the script and outline the scenes from memory. Sometimes he improved on the original, sometimes he didn’t, but his manner of telling was always picturesque. I remember very well one scene going something like this: “You’re in your living room, working on some baby clothes. You register great joy at the coming of the little stranger. Your husband’s away and you’re thinking about a surprise he’s going to get when you give him the glad news. There’s a knock at the door… the mail man… a letter from your husband. Perhaps it’s to say he’s coming back sooner than you expected. You press it to your heart. You break the seal. You read it once. You can’t believe your eyes. You read it again. He ain’t coming back. He ain’t never coming back. He’s gone off with your best friend. Here we’ll count five for you to faint. You drop all of a heap, the letter clutched in your hand. We count five again. You come to. You look around you. ‘Where am I?’ you register. You drag yourself on your hands and knees to the couch, and you throw yourself face down on… shoulders… sobs. Your whole life’s ruined. Nothing matters no more. Suddenly you hear a sound. The latch clicks. You look up. The Baron enters. With a lascivious smile on his lips he comes toward you. “‘So… he’s gone,’ says the Baron. ‘What did I tell you?’ he says. ‘Didn’t I say he was a no-good bum? Didn’t I tell you he was playing around with this dame? And you wouldn’t believe me, would you? You sacrificing yourself, doing your own housework, wearing mangy old duds, never going anywheres, just so he could build up his business. Now you see where he’s brought you.’ “‘Don’t, don’t. Have mercy. Have pity,’ you says. Then he says, ‘Now maybe you’ll listen to me. Maybe you’ll come to have a little sense. There’s lots left to live for. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken. You can have beautiful clothes. You can have maids to wait on you. You can have a fine house, not a dump like you got now. You can have diamonds and yachts, and travel. I’ll settle a hundred thousand dollars on you. All you’ve got to do is say the word.’ “Now he starts coming nearer. He gets his arms around you. You try to push him off of you. You struggle to your feet. But he’s still grabbing you by the waist. Your hair gets all loose and falls over your shoulders. Your kimono tears open at the throat. You try to pull it together, but no use. As you struggle and struggle it gets ripped all the way down. Still you fight on, but you’re no match for the Baron. At last he overpowers you. You fall exhausted…. Cut.” By this time Mr. K had worked himself into a very interesting state of emotion. He was, as was once said of Mr. Gladstone, “carried away by his own exuberance of his own verbosity.” I felt I could never do any sort of justice to the scene after his description of it. This conviction was further strengthened by the fact that the “Baron” was a short, thin, pale weed of an individual whom I could very easily have taken over my knee and given a good trouncing (Petrova 1942, 260–61).
Petrova’s description of Mr. K’s direction contrasts with her experience of working under the direction of Alice Guy Blaché, who was more open to actor’s contributions:
In the first scene, as in all succeeding ones, Madame Blaché outlined vocally what each episode was with action, words appropriate to the situation. If the first or second rehearsal pleased her, even though a player might intentionally or not alter her instructions, as long as they did not hurt the scene, even possibly improve it, she would allow this to pass. If not she would rehearse and rehearse until they did before calling camera. When she had cause to correct a player, she would do this courteously, and in my case, which was more than often, she might resort to her native tongue. This gentle gesture touched me deeply, softened any embarrassment I might feel. After all the scenes were set for the day had been shot, the close-ups followed…. These concluded, Madama looked, and was, tired. But during rehearsals and shooting she never lost her dignity or poise. She wore a silken glove, but she would have been perfectly capable of using a mailed fist if she considered it necessary (Petrova, “A Remembrance,” in Slide 1986a, 102–103).
Women’s Producing Companies: “Her Own” or Not Her Own?
Second Wave feminists often quoted modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s advice that if she is to write “A woman must have money and a room of her own.” The case of women who helped to start companies in the motion picture business, however, is not exactly parallel. Even while the attempt to gain more creative freedom may have explained the fact that there were more total independent companies with women’s names than men’s names, many factors intervened in the complicated process of industrial motion picture production. First, the concept of “Her-Own-Company” that Karen Mahar has retrieved for us is somewhat ironic in that it comes from a 1916 Photoplay editorial that refers to a “‘her-own-company’ epidemic,” by which the magazine means that from its point of view there were entirely too many companies started by star actresses following the example of Mary Pickford and Clara Kimball Young. Second, Mahar divides the phenomenon of women’s companies including the star name company into two “waves” or movements, with Photoplay’s imagined “epidemic” applying to the second. Thus: Movement 1: 1911–1915 and Movement 2: 1916–1923.26 Third, and perhaps most important, Mahar cautions that the star actress’s name is no guarantee of the amount of power she wielded in the enterprise, particularly since the majority of these businesses were male-female partnerships (2006, 62). In the absence of company business records, most telling are documents such as distributor George Kleine’s deposition in the 1915 legal proceedings against Grandin Films involving Ethel Grandin and her husband Ray Smallwood. Clearly we cannot tell from the company name alone about either business arrangements or creative dynamics, and the term “company” may refer to either an independent legal entity or to a creative team, which might include an actress, a director, a writer, a camera operator, and others assigned to work together—again, a company within a larger company.
The Star Name Company
Film studies scholarship on the US star system has been particularly strong on the commodification of the star actress as a modern form of public personhood.27 In this scholarship, female stars such as Marlene Dietrich have been understood as taking symbolic control of their on-screen images.28 Until recently, however, the idea that women in the silent era attempted to take control of their images by legal and economic means was an anomaly. Now, however, a second wave of star studies will need to consider the silent era “actor-producer” as well as the “actor-writer” as we imagine the many who also wrote their own scenarios. The question once posed of how to interpret image and narrative as favoring a woman’s point of view now becomes one of how actresses first used scenario writing as well as performance to turn the tables on convention. If, after they achieved fame, they chafed against creative constraints, how did they manage to break away and start up one business after another? In this regard, Marion Leonard may be as historically significant as Florence Lawrence, so often cited as the first motion picture star. At the Biography Company, Leonard is thought to have written and/or directed the extant one-reel Lucky Jim (1909), in which Jim is not so lucky because he has married a physically abusive shrew. In 1911, Leonard and her director husband, Stanner E. V. Taylor, left Biograph to set up Gem Motion Picture Company, the first of two companies they would start, capitalizing on Leonard’s popularity because they could.
The star name company in which the star’s name may or may not have been used in the title was either a company or a “unit” within a larger studio or company, thus more of what might be called a “dependent company” as opposed to an independent company. For example, actor-director Sydney Olcott and Gene Gauntier worked together as the Olcott-Gauntier unit within the Kalem Company, 1910–1912. After Olcott and Gauntier, along with her husband Jack C. Clark left the Kalem Company, they operated as Gene Gauntier Feature Players Company, an independent company, between 1912 and around 1915. The differences between being a totally “indie” company or a semi-independent company that was part of a larger studio or company boiled down to the sources of capital, the advantage of self-contained departments (editing, publicity, legal), and, most significant in terms of public exhibition, commercial distribution that might be undertaken by the larger company that had its own distribution channels. For some, as was the case with the Kalem Company, distribution to exhibiting theatres was guaranteed by the Motion Picture Patents Company cartel. Later, beginning in 1915, larger companies began to buy up their own theatres, a means of insuring exhibition. Independent companies, however, had to contract with separate distributing or releasing companies, sometimes at their peril. Producer-writer-director Nell Shipman recalled in her autobiography that she had been tricked into taking too low a percentage on the distribution deal that she struck with American Releasing Corporation for The Grub-Stake (1922). As a consequence, she lost money when she should have been the one to profit (114–115).
In the US, companies formed pre-World War I, 1910–1915, were coincident with the foundation of the first moving picture businesses, the transition from one- and two-reel to multireel films (from shorts to features). Post-World War I company foundation corresponded with the American rise to world film industry dominance made easier by weakened French, German, Italian, and British motion picture businesses.29 Here is how social and economic conditions in Mahar’s two high points for US star name companies favored initiatives differently:
Wave 1: 1911–1915: Actresses left Biograph, Kalem, and Vitagraph, the companies that had promoted them to stardom. Marion Leonard, the second “Biograph Girl,” started Gem (1911) and later the Mar-Leon Corporation (1913); the Vitagraph star who gave her name to Helen Gardner Picture Players (1911–12) produced features; and Ethel Grandin, with Raymond C. Smallwood, formed Grandin Films (1914–1915) and later Smallwood Film Corporation. With Sydney Olcott, Gene Gauntier started the Gene Gauntier Feature Players Company (1912–1915), and the first “Biograph Girl” Florence Lawrence, with Harry Solter, her husband, formed the Victor Film Company (1912–1914). Here, as counter to the myth of available US capital, it is notable that “Vitagraph Girl” Florence Turner, frustrated in her attempt to raise financing in the United States, found it in the United Kingdom. With Larry Trimble she set up Turner Films, which operated in Britain, 1913–16, but was curtailed finally by World War I.30 Renting the Hepworth Studios in London, the two produced, among other titles, the extant one-reel comedy in which they compete in a funny face-making contest, Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914). One might have thought that US women, replacing men drafted into the armed forces in World War I, would thus get a foot in the door in the film industry. While women did not replace men in the US, they did in the German film industry, where even an American, a circus performer from Watseka, Illinois, seized the opportunity. She hyphenated her first and last names as the Fern-Andra Company, begun in 1915.
Wave 2: 1916–1923: Let us consider this second high point from the industry perspective of “too many women.” Recall that in December 1916, Photoplay editors identified what they thought was a disturbing development in Hollywood. They count six “producing companies headed by women” either already “grinding out plays” or in early stages of formation (“Close-up,” 63-64). Yet Photoplay makes two exceptions— companies started by Mary Pickford and Clara Kimball Young. Early historical accounts of the US film industry written by Terry Ramsaye and Benjamin Hampton also feature Pickford and Young, although not the many others that the magazine blames for causing an “epidemic” (63). The star name company in the Ramsaye and Hampton versions is seen as part of the story of how US motion pictures became big business. Female stardom is not an opportunity for players to gain creative control. Rather, star recognition is an asset turned to the advantage of the great moguls. In Hampton, Lewis J. Selznick’s idea for a company named for actress Clara Kimball Young, an offshoot of his World Film Corporation, is a “daring” means of financing production through franchises sold as advances against film rentals. Buyers were wealthy investors, including mail order entrepreneur Arthur Spiegel and theatrical agent William O. Brady (135). Terry Ramsaye’s narration of the protracted 1916 deal-making between Pickford and Adolph Zukor gives somewhat more weight to Pickford, who emerges as a canny negotiator. But in Ramsaye’s telling it is Zukor’s Pickford coup that cinches the Famous Players-Lasky purchase of distributor Paramount Pictures Corporation. In time, the birth of mammoth producer-distributor Paramount Pictures would dwarf the actress’s contractual triumphs—the Mary Pickford—named studio and the separate distribution company for her films, Artcraft Pictures Corporation (741–751). See “Motion Picture Distribution: 1910–1923.”
Recent reevaluation of the careers of Clara Kimball Young (Mahar 2006, 164–166) and Mary Pickford (Schmidt 2003, 59–81) see the struggle for creative control more complexly and open the door to understanding the way actress-producers threatened the forces of corporatization in the 1916–1923 moment. The 1919 formation of United Artists as the only production-distribution company run by powerful actors and directors, however, has been just the most visible sign of actor rebellion against studio management.31 But Pickford’s victories were not lost on the other actors and actresses who sought script control, guaranteed distribution, studio space, and a share of the profits in the short moment when stars could take advantage of their bargaining power. Some of these would form Bessie Barriscale Productions, Leah Baird Productions, Anita Stewart Productions, Helen Holmes Production Corporation, and Texas Guinan Productions. Less well known are the attempts of actresses Ruth Stonehouse and Lule Warrenton at producing and directing after they left Universal Pictures.
The risks of independent financing were great, as the case of actress Alla Nazimova illustrates. Nazimova Productions was set up by Lewis J. Selznick within Metro Pictures, where the extant art deco classic Camille (1921), written by June Mathis and designed by Natacha Rambova, was produced. But when in 1922 Nazimova became a United Artists partner, producing the more experimental Salome (1923) with her own capital, she lost everything and was never able to finance another film.32 See “US Companies Outside Hollywood: 1915–1935.” Less dramatic losses were sustained by Margery Wilson Productions on That Something (1921) and Vera McCord on Good-Bad Wife (1921), although these companies never made another film after the first venture.
Highlighted in this overview are only a fraction of cases. There were many more than six “her own” production companies in 1916 and more by 1922, and forty is a better estimate for this second moment if one counts cases in which women started more than one company. See “Women’s Production and Preproduction Companies.” But the new industry attitude toward women in the business is starkly apparent in the Photoplay editorial. Because US fan magazines had been beating the drum enthusiastically for women as producers and directors, the editorial’s negative tone seems an abrupt reversal. Photoplay editors are worried that these start-ups signal a throw-back to a less rigidly stratified and controlled mode of production. Aligning itself with new principles of management applied to the creative process, the magazine sees women’s independent companies as the “bane of the industry,” because, harkening back to an earlier stage, they threaten to “drag film-making back to its days of solitary, suspicious feudal inefficiency” (63–64). Here, in one of the very few articulations of the threat star name companies must have represented to the hierarchization of the studio, we glean insight into the perception of women. They were not team players (“solitary”) and not organized to maximize profit (“inefficient”). Terry Ramsaye, writing the first comprehensive history under the auspices of Photoplay in 1926, would sum up the pro-management terms: “Every element of the creative side of the industry is being brought under central manufacturing control” (833). Finally, in a reversal of their earlier support for the star system, new studio heads Carl Laemmle (Universal) and Adolph Zukor began to identify star actors as a problem. Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount retaliated against actresses and actors’ active resistance to centralization and “efficiency” by announcing in 1922 a war on the star system.33
Another reversal was more devastating to women’s companies. First National Exhibitors’ Circuit, which had been the salvation of independent companies as a distributing consortium, became itself a producing company, Associated First National Pictures. See “Motion Picture Distribution: 1910–1923.” Beginning in 1917, First National had provided production funds for motion pictures planned by Olga Petrova, Anita Stewart, Mary Pickford, Constance Talmadge, Norma Talmadge, Anita Loos, Katharine MacDonald, Mildred Harris-Chaplin, Hope Hampton, and Marguerite Clark.33
Under centralized control in Burbank, California, in 1922, those actresses who had signed with First National lost the advantages of independence. A case study in these changes is Corinne Griffith Productions, whose 1923 First National contract spelled out the new terms. She left the weakening Vitagraph Company at a high point in her career, expecting to make all of the creative decisions for the new Corinne Griffith Productions. Her contract, the prototype of the seven-year contract of the studio system, gave her no control over budget, casting, or script, and no profit-sharing. In 1928, First National was bought by Warner Brothers. Griffith was not an isolated example, considering, for one, Tiffany Productions and Mae Murray, who lost control of her company to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer between 1922 and 1924.35
Motion Picture Distribution: 1910–1923
Independent companies were formed when economic factors favored their chances of securing commercial distribution. The fortunes of women who worked as producers and directors were tied to the corporate struggles to control the domestic motion picture market, the wars to line up production with exhibition and distribution. One approach to the industry battles is thus to see two uncertain periods as windows of opportunity for independent autonomous production companies. In the 1912–1915 period, the MPPC monopoly was breaking up and new production and distribution companies challenged their dominance.36 Then, around 1916–1923 “indie” companies responded strategically to motion picture mogul Adolph Zukor’s attempt to monopolize. He tried to sew up distribution then consolidated production, insuring exhibition outlets for his films by buying up motion picture theatres as the new entity Paramount Pictures. Independent production companies and the consortiums that arranged distribution are only part of the story, however, since in these years both company security as well as “her own” company independence produced opportunity for women.
Considering Alice Guy Blaché as a director-writer-producer helps us to understand the transition from the MPPC power to independent uncertainty and the rule of distribution. She founded the Solax Company in 1910 with every expectation of profitability, perhaps because film distribution was then guaranteed through the French Gaumont company’s arrangements with MPPC licensee George Kleine. Indicative of the close connection between the two companies, the extant short Gaumont comedy Le Matelas alcolique (1906) was recut and distributed by Solax as The Drunken Mattress. But when in 1912 Gaumont broke off with Kleine, Solax released films in the US through the consortium of independents that opposed the MPPC, the short-lived Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company (which became the Sales Company).37 While the Sales Company distribution could be seen as having offered a solution that saved the company, in the long run, without the wider distribution the MPPC offered, Solax was not economically viable (McMahan 2002, 70, 75–77). After the break-up of the MPPC, exhibitors formed consortiums that, through merger or transformation into new entities, came and went. The short-lived distributor Alco Film Corporation, another exhibitors’ consortium, handled distribution for such companies as the Manhattan-based Popular Plays and Players. In the years after the demise of Solax, Alice Guy Blaché, working for Popular Plays and Players,would write and direct The Tigress (1914) with Olga Petrova, whom she helped to make into a motion picture star (McMahan 2002, 1980). After Alco became Metro Pictures Corporation in 1915, the new company distributed The Empress (1917), one of the few extant feature-length Alice Guy Blaché titles, currently not restored.
This connection between economic viability and guaranteed distribution applies as well to all of the companies that belonged to the Motion Picture Patents Company cartel, effective between 1908 and 1912: Edison, Vitagraph, Kalem, Essanay, Biograph, Selig, Pathé, and Lubin. The one- and two-reel short films these women wrote and performed in were distributed through a tightly controlled system of exchanges and licensed theatres. In leaving the MPPC-member Vitagraph Company in 1911 and setting up Helen Gardner Picture Players to produce Cleopatra (1912), Helen Gardner calculated that her best option would be the “road show” approach to print distribution (Bowser 1990, 192).
Later, Lois Weber and other “Universal Women” were guaranteed distribution through Universal Film Manufacturing Company, founded in 1912 by Carl Laemmle, one of the challengers of the MPPC monopoly. Whether her films were made as Rex, Bosworth, or Lois Weber Productions, they were released through Universal, which, in 1916, had ambitions to distribute worldwide in India, Mexico, Australia, and Japan, where the Bluebird brand proved to be popular (Thompson 1985, 72).
The second window of opportunity for independents, which corresponds with Mahar’s 1916–1923 wave of star name companies, was far more important for women’s companies, which benefited from the exhibition-distribution wars. The First National Exhibitors’ Circuit was formed in 1917 by an exhibitors’ consortium in the revolt against Zukor who was then forcing them to accept his prices for the most popular film product. First National, which grew to control perhaps as many as half of the theatres in the country by 1920, was an outlet that made independent companies financially viable for a few years.38 The consortium released the films of Norma and Constance Talmadge and Anita Stewart, among others, and the films of Trimble-Murfin Productions, the company writer Jane Murfin set up with her then-partner Larry Trimble.Setting up Petrova Pictures in 1917, Olga Petrova began with a First National Exhibitors’ Circuit contract for eight films although she finally made only a few of them. As Richard Koszarski explains the situation, Zukor threatened exhibitors because he controlled box-office draw stars, the most important of whom was Mary Pickford. He could, therefore, through the strong-arm tactic of what was called “block-booking,” force exhibitors to take inferior films in order to get Pickford films. First National’s move undercut Zukor’s strategy, which was an orchestrated takeover of his own distributor, Paramount, ousting Paramount founder W. W. Hodkinson and founding Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount (Koszarski 1990, 69–73). See “The Star Name Company.”
A few independent backers left standing outside First National and Paramount in 1922 sometimes helped to fund a single independent feature film. Photoplay’s 1923 article on twenty-two-year-old Grace Haskins features her as the “only other female producer” besides Lois Weber. For her first scenario Just Like a Woman, which she was to direct, Haskins received financial backing from the W. W. Hodkinson Corporation.39 Hodkinson, the founder and former president of Paramount Pictures when it had been a distribution company, was ousted from it in 1916 by Adolph Zukor. Anthony Slide tells us that with his new distribution company, Hodkinson handled the features of Bessie Barriscale. W. W. Hodkinson, however, went out of business in 1924 (Slide 1998, 237). This would explain the fate of Haskins’s film, although Leah Baird Productions, also helped by Hodkinson, stayed afloat until 1927. For a female producer outside Hollywood, the distribution options were limited, but at least they were not directly affected by the upheavals of the great motion picture profit centers. In Florida, once Ruth Bryan Owen had the support of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, she secured distribution through the Society of Visual Education for Once Upon a Time (1922). The history of the distribution company or consortium correlates with the existence of silent era 35mm film prints. If a producing company was ensured wide, even international distribution, more total prints were originally struck, and they were scattered throughout the world, sometimes ending up with foreign language intertitles.
One-Reel to Multireel Productions: The Feature Film
Florence Lawrence, in her “Growing Up with the Movies” recalls that the first production in which she appeared for the Edison Manufacturing Company, Daniel Boone; or, Pioneer Days in America (1907) sold outright for $150, which was 15 cents per foot (41). Within the next two years, however, the MPPC, of which Edison was the controlling member, put in place a system of film print rental as opposed to purchase, an attempt to control the 35mm print duplication considered a copyright violation. Thus we understand the 1909–1912 years of the MPPC as the period of rented shorts and the all-shorts mixed-genre exhibition program.
The one- or two-reel short film represented creative opportunity, and if there is a Golden Era of writing, producing, and directing for women in the US industry, it corresponded with the vogue in shorts. The very first women’s independent companies organized by Marion Leonard (Gem) and Ethel Grandin (Grandin Films) made shorts exclusively, and the prolific output of Alice Guy Blaché at the Solax Company, 1910–1912, was predominantly shorts. While it can be said that the MPPC actively sabotaged the independent producers and distributors, MPPC policy extended the heyday of the short film program even after it was clear that features were the future of the industry. On this point, Eileen Bowser makes the case that it was not the MPPC producer-members but the exhibitors that resisted changing the variety program over which they had more programming control. Although features were exhibited in 1910, they would have been distributed outside the exhibition system sewn up by the MPPC (1990, 192).
The bonus for women in the extended life span of the one-reel short is evident in the sheer number of credits for those who started at Vitagraph as an actress or a writer (Florence Turner, Marguerite Bertsch), Biograph (Mary Pickford ), or Kalem (Gene Gauntier). Most of the “Universal Women,” in addition to Lois Weber, Cleo Madison, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Ruth Stonehouse, and Ida May Park, practiced on the short films that Universal continued to make in the 1914–1916 period when other companies had made the transition to feature films. Most important, the popularity of comedy shorts made the careers of comediennes Alice Howell, Gale Henry, Marie Dressler, Flora Finch, and Fay Tincher. Short serials, which continued after the dramatic feature film, became the norm, providing work for Pearl White, Helen Holmes, Kathlyn Williams, and Grace Cunard. While it may be impossible to determine exactly how many female as opposed to male actors wrote, as we will see, what we can say is that many actresses also wrote stories. See “Scenario Writer to Screenwriter.”
But the sheer number of creative opportunities was eventually reversed when the more expensive multireel feature film became the standard, and it became more difficult to secure financing for larger production budgets. As Karen Mahar has pointed out, although feature films originally provided opportunity for independent companies outside the MPPC distribution and exhibition system, as the multireel feature presentation became the standard, the competitive strategy behind the feature film business involved eliminating small companies by raising the capital investment required (2006).
What Happened to Them?
One answer to this question of what happened to the women’s independent companies, largely gone by 1923, is that they were caught in a second corporate power-grab, a second monopoly thrust after the court-decreed end of the first.40 Many factors, however, were contributive: the 1918 flu epidemic and 1921 business recession meant that demand was down and consequently production slowed in these years. But while this confluence of factors explains changes in the industry in economic terms, another set of factors are needed to explain the difficulty women had finding employment or their decision to go into “retirement.” Women who specialized in scenario writing, however, were more apt to continue working for the new studios or to make a living freelancing. It seems likely that independent companies started by writers bucked the trend as with, for instance, Marion Fairfax Productions in 1922 and Lillian Case Russell with husband John Lowell’s Lowell Film Productions in 1925. In two other cases former actresses resumed work writing and producing. The best example is Dorothy Davenport Reid (1924–1929) but Leah Baird also did more writing than acting for Leah Baird Productions (1921–1927), started as part of a husband-wife team with producer Arthur Beck. After director William Desmond Taylor was murdered, his screenwriter Julia Crawford Ivers produced at least one film for Kathlyn Williams in 1917 and directed another, The White Flower (1923). See “US Companies Outside Hollywood: 1915–1935.”
Scenario Writer to Screenwriter
The first scenarios, if they existed at all, were as Gene Gauntier describes the process she observed when she arrived at the Kalem Company, six scenes sketched out on the back of a used business envelope (Gauntier Oct. 1928, 181). Writers, she says, were even for a few years paid twice as much as directors, evidence of the value of the story during this early shortage.41 At the same time that women did the work of screenwriting, directing, and producing, the question of what should be “women’s work” was, as yet, unresolved, and still, as Wendy Holliday has argued, over the 1907–1920 years, writing was becoming “women’s work.” Holliday notes a most interesting paradox—the thankless nature of the anonymous job held in such low esteem with such low pay produced an opening for women. Filling this opening, they helped to define scenario writing which, for some, turned into a position of influence in the earliest companies (1995, 86, 119). More than one author has stated that fifty percent of the writers in the silent era were women, but this figure would have to be an estimate.42 Moving Picture World quotes Clara Beranger, referring to 1918 releases, as saying that there were more “writers” who were women, but she was implying that women were the real writers or better writers than men.43 The problem with exaggeration is compounded by the fact that writing was not always carefully credited on motion picture prints, and credits were often shared or they may have been in dispute. Trade press advertisements and reviews we have access to today may be incorrect, and company records, when they exist, are incomplete. Finally, especially with writing, the difference between the terms “source author,” “adapter,” and “scenario writer” on published credits is not always possible to distinguish. But first, what is meant by a scenario?
The term scénario cinématographique can be traced to a title used by Georges Méliès on his Le voyage dans la lune/Trip to the Moon (1902) in France, but was soon imported as “scenario,” meaning “dramatic composition” and used in relation to an American Mutoscope and Biograph film in 1904. At first, the scenario was nothing more than a short synopsis, and gradually it came to resemble what we would today call a script or screenplay with scenes listed in sequence.44 One often sees the term “photoplaywright” and “scenarist” but less often “photodramatist” in the silent era.45 The scenario writer, as she evolved, was a function of the silent era, a position that disappeared in the sound era where the evolution was toward a script containing dialogue, the screenplay as we now know it, and the term “screenwriter.” On credits we use the term “Screen Writer” here to bridge the two terms and two eras.
The 1907 to 1920 period is characterized by the professionalization and institutionalization of writing for the screen, although in the first half of this period, when the demand for stories was so high, many actresses also wrote their own scenarios. Epes W. Sargent even reported in Moving Picture World that at the Edison Company everyone on the set was writing scenarios.46 Around 1909, companies also began to advertise to the public for original stories.47 According to scholars, departments appeared around 1911, the first year that Sargent published the first screenwriting manual and the Edison Company began to give some writers screen credit.48
Women as well as men supervised scenario departments, taking the highly responsible position of scenario editor, some for relatively long tenures, like Marguerite Bertsch at Vitagraph (1914–1920), Bradley King at Ince (1920–1926), Gertrude Thanhouser at Thanhouser (1915–1918), and Lillian Spellman Stone at the Lubin Company. Robert Grau, in his 1914 The Theatre of Science, gives a highly complimentary account of these women, whom he saw as “practically the most important executives in the studios, occupying the same position and holding the same authority as the editor-in-chief of the story magazine.”49
As a company job, the scenario writer was sometimes also responsible for titling, or intertitle writing, and within this labor of writing there might have been another breakdown: continuity writer, film editor, and scenario editor (McGilligan 1986, 2). Some women established themselves as both film editor and scenario editor, the latter of which required more writing, as, for example, Beta Breuil and Hettie Gray Baker, who emerged from the editing department to head up departments as scenario editors. In her 1914 Art of Photoplay Writing, Catherine Carr describes the responsibilities of the scenario editor in what she calls the “maiden trip” of the manuscript:
First it is delivered to the Scenario Department, where it is duly opened and catalogued by an under clerk. It then reaches the professional reader (if the company is a large one), and if thought to contain merit, it is finally placed upon the Editor’s desk, where it has its final reading and the decision is made to either retain it or return it… When the manuscript has been purchased, and the author has signed the necessary release slip, stating that it is original and not an adapted theme, the work of making the picture begins (21).50
Carr was among the group of women who saw scenario writing as a profession and wrote manuals published in the silent as well as in the sound era.
Screenwriting drew from a bottomless labor pool, indicated by the number of submissions the scenario editor had to manage. In “A Message to Scenario Writers,” Louella Parsons, scenario editor at Essanay Film Company, estimates that the Chicago company was receiving six hundred unsolicited scenarios a week, the majority of which were “worthless” (Carr 1914, 116). Although trade papers and fan magazines encouraged audience members to send stories, only Lenore Coffee, Anita Loos, and Agnes Christine Johnson began significant careers by mailing stories to studios.51 Because of the deluge of scenarios, reading and evaluating “plots” defined the arduous labor of those in the scenario department. The number of scenarios received also points to the existence of the workforce of freelance scenario writers, best described as what Wendy Holliday has called the “professional amateur” (1995, 104). But for the career writers featured here, the telltale news item mentioning that she left a company to freelance is more than likely an indication that she was out of a job.
June Mathis began as a scenario writer and then at Metro Pictures advanced to scenario editor and producer, where she is often credited with discovering Rudolph Valentino and writing the script for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) from the popular novel.52 Mathis, Gertrude Thanhouser, and Mary Pickford were effectively the only silent era female studio executives.
Continuity Script
After the institution of the scenario department in the major production companies, around 1911, another job evolved, that of preparing a detailed shooting script from story submissions or literary properties (Holliday 1995, 107–108). As Janet Staiger has described the continuity script, it was a “blueprint,” not only for the director and other creative personnel to follow but the basis of cost breakdowns and budget projection (1985, 189–91). In later years, separate credit for continuity writing was given in addition to one for original source material author (abbreviated here as “aut”) and scenario writer or screenwriter (“sc”). Title writing became more specialized and might have been given a separate credit, as was the case with the team Katharine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell. But, as Karen Mahar has pointed out, the continuity script that first increased the importance of women working in the scenario department later worked to their detriment as the continuity script was employed by management to rein in production (2006, 182).
Names and Pseudonyms
Males assumed female and females, male names. Bertha Muzzy Sinclair was B. M. Bower; Eve Unsell was E. M. Unsell or Oliver W. Geoffreys; Clara S. Beranger became Charles S. Beranger. When she wrote with Jane Cowell, Jane Murfin and Cowell became together Allan Langdon Martin. Alla Nazimova was either Peter M. Winters or took the name of former husband Charles Bryant. Married women often took their husbands’ names as professional names (Mrs. George Randolph Chester) or added a married name to a string of others. Lucille McVey went by Mrs. Sidney Drew in partnership with her husband but also by the pseudonym Jane Morrow. At least once, the married partner name worked in gender reverse, as when writer John Lowell, who worked with Lillian Case Russell, was credited as John L. Russell. With gender made ambiguous by the use of initials, there was always the risk, as was the case with Lillian Case Russell, that as L. C. Russell, she would be referred to in the trade press as “Mr. Russell,” as she once was.53 At least one anecdote circulated in 1912 in a Moving Picture World news item. A woman confirms that her scenario was rejected when she used a woman’s name, and accepted when she replaced it with a man’s name (Holliday 99–100).
“Networking,” Mentoring, and Friendships
Another age is interested in what is now called “networking” and one might assume from the photo of eight former Vitagraph players that Norma Talmadge has thrown an all-female party to facilitate professional connections. But in 1926, the six of these women who had started star name companies no longer had them, so not one was in a position to give others a chance. Another photograph taken at the same social event reveals that former male Vitagraphers were in attendance as well. There still is abundant evidence, however, of women working together in the silent era even before there was a term for professional connecting. Beatrice deMille helped both Marguerite Bertsch and Beulah Marie Dix to get started as aspiring playwrights in New York and remained Dix’s close friend for years. It is now well known, thanks to Cari Beauchamp, that Frances Marion took professional risks to do favors for Marie Dressler and Lorna Moon (1997, 264–67). Beauchamp also published a photograph of Marion’s friends together that she uses as evidence of a kind of “networking,” as Shelly Stamp suggests (2012). But the press at the time referred to them as “cat parties” or “hen parties” (Beauchamp 1998, 231) We know about some because they corresponded with a close female friend. Juliet Barrett Rublee wrote to birth control advocate Margaret Sangor and Ruth Bryan Owen to political campaign worker Carrie Dunlap. Yet we can still look for rivalries. Although one of Lois Weber’s first opportunities was with Alice Guy Blaché’s Solax Company, it is likely that Herbert Blaché hired her, and Guy Blaché’s remark in her memoir about the claim that Weber was the first woman director is telling (Slide 1996a, 79).
Publicity and Hyperbole
One of the general principles of the modern entertainment industry is that it orchestrated its own wildly enthusiastic reception. Industry publicists sent out the releases that were copied verbatim in the local press, a practice that now presents a special historiographic challenge. In summer 1915, several papers printed an item about Miriam Nesbitt stating that the actress would become the first woman director at the Edison Company studio and would even write the story.54 All articles refer to the San Francisco and San Diego settings and to a film titled A Close Call. Scholars are still searching for evidence that the film was shot. Studio biographies were especially elastic. In 1909, Miriam Nesbitt, performing in a stage play in Atlanta, is featured in the Atlanta Constitution as “a former Atlanta girl.” The same year, appearing in a film in Chicago, Nesbitt is called “a Chicago product” by the Chicago Tribune. Entertainment personnel themselves contributed to the confusion. When writer Eve Unsell died in 1937, her obituary gave her age as fifty, but if we were to go by the varying dates she gave the US Census taker, she would have been either forty-five or fifty-eight when she died. Sada Cowan reduced her age by twelve years when she married a second time.
Since most sources used in US motion picture history are mass vehicles with a promotional agenda—the popular press, fan magazines, and industry trade papers—film historiography has and must continue to proceed with caution. Professional ballyhoo’s linguistic hyperbole, its unabashed enthusiasm for entertainment, not only creeps into scholarly writing but promotes a worldview. In this worldview, success is contagious, everything bigger is better, and dreams are always achievable, even for women. Film stories and press puff pieces are cut from the same fabric and were often written by the same women. Louella Parsons began work as a silent film scenarist and easily transitioned to gossip columnist. Literary works by Photoplay writer Adela Rogers St. Johns were adapted as the Dorothy Davenport Reid production of The Red Kimono (1925) and the The Single Standard (1929), a Greta Garbo melodrama adapted by Josephine Lovett. There is temptation to let the upbeat journalism of the time write the story of women in the silent film industry for us. In 1923, E. Leslie Gilliams published “Will Women’s Leadership Change Movies?” in the Illustrated World. But the article pins hopes for industry reform to a phenomenon that no longer existed by 1923.55
Genres and Modes
In the silent era, American motion pictures of all types were in the process of what Rick Altman calls “genrification” and “regenrification” and thus the following is a retrospective categorization.56 In the silent era, comedy genres fell into two large categories: slapstick and sophisticated sex comedy-drama. Interest in slapstick comedy has been energized by the recent establishment of the connection between the structure of the “pie and the chase” and the “cinema of attractions.”57 Relative to comedy, melodrama considered as a genre is much more fraught. Although it is clear that a generous percentage of the first story films, dating from 1903, were versions of well-known theatrical melodramas, the term “melodrama” does not always show up in the trade literature (Singer 2001, 38). What the silent era writer-director-actress-producer called a “drama” is closer to what contemporary critics understand as “melodrama.” In recent years, however, critics have continued to ask if all popular American film could be understood as having an underlying melodrama structure.58 More precisely, Christine Gledhill now argues that melodrama is a “modality” that “supervises” many genres.59 This move serves to reinforce her earlier assertion that the Western and the action film, for instance, are male melodramas.60 Thinking of the hypothesis that in the silent era fifty percent of the writers were women, this premise takes on new meaning, especially since melodrama in its literary and theatrical moments has historically been gendered “female.”61 Many female directors, writers, and producers subscribed to an idea that women, as Alice Guy Blaché wrote, were an “authority on the emotions” (Slide 1996, 140). Also relevant is the experience brought by so many of these women from both stage writing (Beulah Marie Dix, Beatrice deMille, Leah Baird) as well as stage acting (Lois Weber, Gene Gauntier, Ethel Grandin, Alla Nazimova, Mary Pickford, Lucille McVey). Study of their surviving work from the standpoint of the close connection to American vaudeville and legitimate theatre locates this work at the intersection between late-Victorian stage morality and New Woman modern morality. In the invention of genres and subgenres (the serial thriller with its action heroine), we find accommodation to the newest technologies of speed—the railroad, the automobile—as backdrop to the heroine’s bodily defiance of gravity and social convention. Alternatively, the dizzying highs and lows of the urban fast life are manifest in a new phenomena—the sophisticated sex drama—as, for instance, the original screenplays credited to Jeanie Macpherson working exclusively for director-producer Cecil B. DeMille and exemplified by such extant titles as Forbidden Fruit (1921), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), and the Gloria Swanson vehicles Male and Female (1919) and Manslaughter (1922). Studio staff writers like Macpherson at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount might have written costume dramas, epic dramas, and adventure dramas as well as sophisticated comedies, although not slapstick comedies, which were highly specialized.
Women as Comedy Writers and Producers
Contemporary feminist scholarship finds silent film comedy a site of maximum female subterfuge and transgression. Slapstick comedy is an outlet for the New Woman’s defiance of propriety and stifling social convention. Dot Farley made bodily distortions her trademark, and Gale Henry, the“Elongated Comedienne,” was known for her “mismatched parts,” as seen in the extant Her First Flame (1919), an enactment of a future in which men wear dresses and women are in charge. Mabel Normand learned to direct as well as to write her own material while working at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company. Much of her Keystone work is extant although it is not always credited to her. Mickey (1918), the one film she completed after she went independent as the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company, survives. Most of these silent film star comediennes also attempted independent companies. There was the Flora Finch Company and Fay Tincher Productions. Gale Henry started the Model Film Company, and the Marie Dressler Motion Picture Corporation produced the extant Scrublady (1917), a tour de force solo performance built around a mop and a bucket. Alice Howell as the star actress “draw” made it possible for Pathé Lehrman to start L-KO, which, in the pre-World War I period had its own international distribution. Distribution abroad explains why prints of motion pictures featuring Howell are today found in the FIAF archives in Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
Westerns
If there is one genre that exemplifies the problem with retrospective categorization, it is the Western, which might have been called the “horse melodrama” or be seen as a railroad drama in the first decade of the silent era.62 Many women writers as well as directors turned out what we now think of as Western genre films, beginning with Alice Guy Blaché, who directed and produced the extant Two Little Rangers (1912), a girl adventure short filmed in New Jersey and set in the American West. At Universal Pictures, Ruth Ann Baldwin directed and wrote ’49–’17 (1917), a Western genre parody short film, shot in the same studio as John Ford’s first feature-length film, Straight Shooting (1917). Josephine Rector wrote the Essanay Westerns starring “Bronco Billy” Anderson and Western pulp novelist Bertha Muzzy Bower adapted her stories for the screen. Beatriz Michelena specialized in films set in the American West, and although none of the films produced by Beatriz Michelena Productions survives, films in which she developed her persona do—Just Squaw (1919), Salomy Jane (1914), and Woman Who Dared (1916). Similarly, although none of the 1921 films produced by Texas Guinan Productions is extant, eleven titles produced just before the 1918–1920 years of her company do exist, including The Gun Woman (1918). Comedienne Fay Tincher, in a second career phase, became “Rowdy Ann.”
Sensational Melodrama: Action Serials and Cliffhangers
An emphasis on action and spectacle separates the sensational melodrama from the melodrama of pathos as Ben Singer has defined the difference (Singer 2001, 55–56). Recent scholarship has singled out the sensational melodrama as a manifestation of the most liberated aspects of New Woman, which find expression in the physical daring and intellectual prowess of the serial heroines (Mahar 2006, ch. 4; Singer 2001, ch. 7; Koszarski 1990, 164–166; Bean 2002, 404–433).63 Bean sees the “extraordinary body” as exemplified not only by the serial queens, but by Marie Dressler, Texas Guinan, Annette Kellerman, Cleo Madison, and Nell Shipman (2002, 406).
Gene Gauntier has been credited with creating the cross-dressing Girl Spy series for the Kalem Company, the series of action pictures beginning in 1909 that would reach a high point in the Grace Cunard and Francis Ford serials at Universal Film Manufacturing Company a decade later (Everett 1973, 22; Mahar 2001, 105). In “Blazing the Trail,” Gauntier describes daredevil films she madly wrote just before she dared to perform them. It is likely that some of these film are extant, although for years they were located only in archives outside the United States: The Girl Spy (1909), The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg (1910), and Further Adventures of the Girl Spy (1910) (Gaines 2010, 294). Most of the Cunard-Ford episodes from the popular Universal serials Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery (1914) and The Purple Mask (1916–1917) survive in the US Library of Congress, and it is clear that Cunard not only wrote and acted in The Purple Mask, but directed some of the episodes in which she plays a jewel thief who takes the law into her own hands. Like Gauntier, Kathlyn Williams also wrote and directed action pictures, starting at Selig Polyscope Company in 1910. She is best known for the now lost The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913–1914), considered the first serial to “hold over” suspense from chapter to chapter. Two reels of The Leopard’s Foundling (1914), which she is credited with directing, are extant, but very little else, except Lost in Transit (1917), produced by Julia Crawford Ivers late in Williams’s career. Pearl White, the serial queen with the greatest longevity, benefited from the distribution arm of the French Pathé Frères Company, where she began in 1914 at their New Jersey studio with The Perils of Pauline. Her first enormously popular serial was followed by Exploits of Elaine (1914), on which production was farmed out to the Eclectic Film Company and the Wharton Film Company beginning in 1915. Episodes of these 1914 serials are found in archives in multiple countries because Pathé had worldwide distribution before World War I. Also extant are chapters of The Iron Claw (1917), Pearl of the Army (1917), House of Hate (1918), The Lightning Raider (1919), and Plunder (1922–23). Helen Holmes carried on the legacy of Gene Gauntier at the Kalem Company with The Hazards of Helen, beginning in 1914, directed by husband J. P. McGowan, an episode of which is on the US Library of Congress Film Registry list. Also extant are episodes of the later The Girl and the Game (1915–1916), which she produced with McGowan, confirming her own assertion that if an actress wanted to make an action serial truly thrilling she had to write her own danger-packed scenarios. When Holmes left Kalem, she was replaced by a second “Helen,” Helen Rose Gibson, who continued the Hazards of Helen serials, which ran one hundred and nineteen weeks from November 1914 until March 1917 (Singer 2001, 197). Episodes of Ethel Grandin in The Crimson Stain Mystery (1917) are extant.
Domestic Melodrama
Differentiated from sensational melodrama, in recent criticism domestic melodrama has been broken down into subgenres such as the maternal melodrama or even more finely, the male reformation melodrama.64 The existence of so many early silent melodramas written and even directed and produced by women challenge the dominance of D. W. Griffith, whose short and feature films have become canonical. A closer comparison of the extant White Water (1924), produced by Nell Shipman Productions, and Way Down East (1920) reveals a cross-cut river rescue that rivals the ice flow sequence in Griffith’s canonical work in its technical achievement. The extant The Rosary (1913), written and directed by Lois Weber, is more inventive with the frame than Griffith ever was. Where Griffith might have used an iris effect on one or two scenes, Weber uses a circular cutout in every frame of the short Civil War melodrama about a soldier given up for dead who returns from the battlefield to find that his fiancée has sequestered herself in a convent.
Gene Gauntier adapted Irish stage melodramatist Dion Boucicault and appeared in four Boucicault titles, two of which are extant—The Colleen Brawn (1911) and Rory O’More (1911). Another Boucicault, After Dark (1915), with adaptation by Eugenie Magnus Ingleton, also has survived.65 Lenore Coffee made a version, still extant, of the classic maternal melodrama East Lynne (1925), which is often understood as the source of Madame X, memorialized by Lana Turner in the 1950s. The classic melodrama of infidelity, A Woman of Affairs (1928), also surviving, was adapted for Greta Garbo by Bess Meredyth. Appearing on the National Film Registry is also Miss Lulu Bett (1921), adapted by Clara Beranger from the best-selling Zona Gale novel about a spinster who is mistreated by her family. Three of the crime dramas in which writer Ouida Bergère specialized—Idols of Clay (1920), Kick In (1923), and The Man From Home (1922), are extant. Two examples of what could be called antiwar melodramas survive—The Love Light (1921), written and directed by Frances Marion for Mary Pickford, and If My Country Should Call (1916), written by Ida May Park and featuring a mother who secretly gives her son heart-stopping medicine to keep him from enlisting. Imported from England by Cecil B. DeMille to give her trademark racy sophistication to his production line-up, Elinor Glyn adapted her own novel Beyond the Rocks (1922) for Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount, featuring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino.66 Glyn went on to write a second screen version of her novel Three Weeks (1924) for Goldwyn Pictures. The concept she invented, the undefinable but essential “It,” would not be made until 1927 with Clara Bow, adapted by Hope Loring.
Archival Filmography: Motion Picture Film Archives
Because so many more film titles have come to light since the first publications on women in the US silent film industry, we emphasize archival holdings. Note, for instance, the distinctions we make in the Career Profiles between not extant and extant titles. Now, post the 1982 Brighton Symposium, the silent era is no longer defined by a few canonical D. W. Griffith titles. But why, if so many more women were creatively active than once thought, do we find relatively few extant examples of it? Because the female-headed independent companies of the 1916–1923 period had limited distribution (with few prints struck), the odds are against the survival of these films. It may be that relatively more prints from the 1911–1915 phase can be located because in those years companies such as Vitagraph struck multiple prints and got them into international distribution. These prints may have survived because they ended up in archives outside the United States. As for prints held by the gigantic US Library of Congress, Division of Motion Pictures, Sound Recording, and Broadcasting, many titles, either on cellulose nitrate or years ago transferred to cellulose triacetate (“safety”) film have not been viewed since their deposit. Such was the case with three Universal Pictures titles not viewed until recently. One thinks of the complete 35mm print of When Little Lindy Sang (1916), a short race issue movie featuring a Black child who saves her classmates written by Olga Printzlau and directed by character actress Lule Warrenton, who imagined having her own company. Most likely it is the long arm of Universal Pictures distribution that explains the survival of this title, discovered in a cache of nitrate films buried in Dawson City, Canada, in 1978. Also part of the lode of prints were parts of the Universal feature film Bread (1916), directed by Ida May Park, although the fragments show significant image deterioration.67
More amazing have been the discoveries of films made by independent companies whose prints were not circulated by established distributors. An example would be the 35mm print of the Helen Gardner Picture Players Company feature A Sister to Carmen (1913) located by Gardner’s granddaughter in a group of films found by the son of the former owner of the Ripley Hippodrome in Derbyshire, England.68 More recently, two prints of The Curse of the Quon Gwon (1917), produced, directed, and written by Marion E. Wong (who also appears in her film), were found to be held by her family, although all that had previously been known of her Mandarin Motion Picture Company in Oakland, California, was from a 1917 Moving Picture World blurb.69 Still elusive is a section of En defense propia/In Her Own Defense (1917), produced by Mimí Derba and rumored to exist in Mexico, where she and documentary filmmaker Enrique Rosas started Azteca Films in 1917.70
Estimates in the 1970s were that fewer than twenty-five percent of silent era films survived, but a 1990s Library of Congress report was somewhat more precise. There the rate of survival is estimated at from seven to twelve percent of each year’s feature film releases in the 1910s and somewhat higher, from fifteen to twenty-five percent for the 1920s.71 Of the 16 short films directed, codirected, and/or written by Cleo Madison, two survive in the Library of Congress—Eleanor’s Catch (1916) and Her Defiance (1916). This twelve percent figure is remarkable, as is the eight percent of the films (four of fifty) written by Margaret Turnbull whose The Case of Becky (1915), The Secret Sin (1915), and Lost and Won (1917) survive. The Case of Becky allows us to see Blanche Sweet in a tour de force performance of her character’s split personality disorder developed over two reels in which she resorts to facial contortions that D. W. Griffith might have found unattractive.
At this stage, before we attempt a systematic search of the FIAF member holdings, it is too soon to estimate how many productions by women writers, producers, and directors survive. Just when we conclude that there are no extant films, titles are located in private collections or found deep within existing national vaults. To give one example: We might have concluded that no prints survived of those titles written by Marguerite Bertsch, head of the scenario department at Vitagraph and author of How to Write for Moving Pictures.72 But a search of the FIAF Treasures database reveals that the Amsterdam Filmmuseum holds prints with Dutch language intertitles of The Diver (1913) and The Troublesome Stepdaughters (1912). Easier still, one can find the names of these women buried in the published credits for titles produced after 1911. If, for instance, looks closely at the credits on the gay camp classic A Florida Enchantment (1914), one finds that Bertsch adapted the Vitagraph comedy about cross-dressing directed by Sidney Drew. Check the Women Film Pioneers Project home page regularly for new finds.
—
Notes: | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 86 | https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/movies-like-after-on-netflix-46829760 | en | 17 Dramatic Netflix Romances to Watch Once You Finish the After Series | [
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"Amanda Prahl"
] | 2019-10-31T19:05:07+00:00 | If you watched "After" and are looking for another romantic coming-of-age drama, here are 17 options for love stories on Netflix. | en | /static/ps-favicon.ico | Popsugar | https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/movies-like-after-on-netflix-46829760 | The romantic drama "After" quickly became a fan favorite thanks to its combination of sweeping romance and a good-girl-bad-boy dynamic. Fans of the book series it's based on fell in love with Hardin Scott (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and Tessa Young (Josephine Langford) when the first novel was released in 2014, and then they got to see the characters come to life in the first film in 2019. There have since been four more movies in the series, including 2022's "After Ever Happy" and "After Everything," released this September.
But if you've already enjoyed all the movies in the After series, don't worry. We've rounded up a list of Netflix movies like "After" to keep the romance flowing. Some of them feature handsome bad boys, while others focus on women who are just starting to come out of their shells. There are film series like To All The Boys I Loved Before and the Kissing Booth, plus newer Netflix hits like "Purple Hearts" and "Along For the Ride." If you're looking to lose yourself for a couple hours in a scorching romance, we have some ideas about which movies are worth your time.
Read on for 17 movies like "After" streaming on Netflix now. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 69 | https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/examples-of-allusion/ | en | 15 Examples of Allusion in Literature & Poetry | [
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] | 2024-03-08T19:38:38+00:00 | College Transitions is a smarter approach to college admission. College Transitions offers a data-driven menu of services that help students identify good-fit schools, maximize their admission prospects, and make the most of their college investment. | en | College Transitions | https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/examples-of-allusion/ | Whether you are an aspiring novelist or just trying to spice up your personal statement, utilizing literary devices is a great way to make your writing more colorful and engaging. Although there are many literary devices to choose from, one of the most popular is allusion. You might not realize it, but you probably consume literature, film, and music that is chock-full of allusion examples. For example, Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” contains allusions to Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Similarly, the movie Shrek alludes to many movies, including The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
As these examples indicate, allusion is a versatile literary device that can enhance your enjoyment and comprehension of media, as well as your own writing. In this post, we’ll explore the concept of allusion by discussing allusion examples, including examples of allusion in poetry and examples of allusion in literature.
What is allusion?
In your everyday conversations, you have probably heard someone use the verb allude. We often say that people are alluding to an idea when we suspect they are making an indirect reference to a concept or topic without acknowledging it directly. Allusion, as a literary device, means something similar. According to the Poetry Foundation, an allusion is a “brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement.”
For example, you might hear someone say they went “down a rabbit hole” when researching a topic. This doesn’t mean they literally found a burrow. Instead, this phrase is an allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland that communicates the speaker spent more time than they planned reading about an interesting or unusual idea. Similarly, you may have called someone a “Scrooge” when they were being greedy, alluding to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Most allusions, including these examples, refer to people, concepts, or events, often coming from an external piece of media like a book, movie, or artwork. However, internal allusions in a piece of writing can also make reference to something that occurred earlier within a text.
Allusion Examples (Continued)
What distinguishes allusion from your run-of-the-mill reference is how indirect and, usually, brief this device is. When writers use allusion, they do not typically call overt attention to it or explain the reference. As a result, readers may or may not pick up on all examples of allusion.
Since allusions are indirect, you might be wondering, why use this technique at all? Like other literary devices, allusion can add depth and dimension to writing, providing writers with an efficient tool that can help them enrich a text by connecting it to a broader cultural, literary, or historical context. Moreover, allusion can help a writer construct meaning or establish tone in cases where allusions are used metaphorically or ironically. Essentially, allusion can act as a type of shorthand that helps writers convey meaning. With this foundation in mind, let’s look at some allusion examples to see how they work in practice.
Allusion Examples in Poetry
Regardless of whether they reference internal or external ideas, allusions are virtually always brief. For this reason, readers will commonly encounter allusion examples in poetry. Let’s examine some examples.
1) “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
In the “The Raven,” American poet Edgar Allan Poe crafts a narrative poem in which the narrator laments their heartbreak over the death of their lover, Lenore, to the eponymous raven, who frustrates the narrator with their repeated response of “Nevermore.” There are several allusion examples in “The Raven” including the reference made in line 41:
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
In Greek mythology, Pallas is the goddess of wisdom and useful arts. With this knowledge, readers’ may interpret Poe’s choice to have the raven perch on this bust as an indicator of the raven’s intelligence, which is left ambiguous in the poem. This allusion may also reflect the narrator’s desire for answers to his questions about death and memory.
2) “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
Also referred to as “Prufrock,” this poem was T.S. Eliot’s first professionally published poem. Inspired by his Modernist peers, Eliot wrote “Prufrock” using a stream of consciousness technique to explore the narrator’s thoughts. In “Prufrock,” Eliot utilizes multiple examples of allusion, including the reference made in line 94:
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
Here, Lazarus is a Biblical allusion, likely referring to the Lazarus in John 11, who Jesus raised from the dead. However, this allusion could also be in reference to another Biblical Lazarus in Luke 16. This figure returns from the dead at the behest of a rich man who has been sent to Hell to warn the man’s family so they can avoid the same fate. In either case, this allusion, in the poem’s context, seems to reflect the narrator’s feelings of frustration and disillusionment.
Allusion Examples in Poetry (Continued)
3) “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost
As a seminal American poet, Robert Frost often utilized naturalistic imagery to explore his reflections on the human experience. In “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Frost pairs this imagery with Biblical allusion:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
In this passage, Frost alludes to the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man as explored in the Bible. Through this example of allusion, Frost explores the impermanence of paradise by referencing Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. In doing so, he communicates his point that nothing lasts forever.
4) “A Name” by Ada Limón
In her poetry collection, The Carrying, Ada Limón frequently reflects on the power of names. Readers can see this theme reflected in the collection’s opening poem:
When Eve walked among
the animals and named them—
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer—
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, name me.
Here, we see another Biblical example of allusion to the story of Adam and Eve. Knowledgeable readers will notice how this allusion modifies the Creation story. In the Bible, Adam is the person who names the animals in Eden rather than Eve. By changing this part of the narrative, Limón emphasizes the power of names and those who choose them.
Allusion Examples in Poetry (Continued)
5) “The Disquieting Muses” by Sylvia Plath
Known for her confessional poetry, Sylvia Plath has many allusion examples in her work to myths and fairy tales. We can see one such example of allusion in her ekphrastic poem, “The Disquieting Muses”:
Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening
This allusion to an unwelcome guest at a christening calls back the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty. You may remember that, in Sleeping Beauty, an evil fairy curses the princess at her christening, setting the story in motion. In Plath’s poem, this example of allusion helps communicate the speaker’s feelings of resentment and blame toward their mother.
6) “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats
An ode is a type of lyrical poetry that celebrates a person, event, or object. This style was popular among many Romantic poets, including John Keats. The first stanza of his poem, “Ode to a Nightingale,” is also a great example of allusion in poetry:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
This stanza actually has several allusion examples, many of which prominently reference Greek mythology. Lethe is a river in the Underworld that is commonly associated with forgetfulness. Similarly, the Dryad is a tree nymph, an allusion Keats uses to characterize the nightingale as mythical and ethereal. Through these examples of allusion, Keats expresses his emotions about the contrast between the joyous, natural world of the nightingale and the more structured nature of human society.
Allusion Examples in Poetry (Continued)
7) “Siren Song” by Margaret Atwood
Many examples of allusion are isolated to a particular line or phrase in a poem. However, some allusions play out over the course of entire works, as is the case with Atwood’s “Siren Song.” In this poem, Atwood alludes to The Odyssey, specifically its myth of the Sirens. Readers of The Odyssey will remember that Sirens are mythical creatures who lure sailors to their deaths through their song. Through the entirety of “Siren Song,” Atwood uses allusion to subvert our perspective on the figure of the Siren by making one of them the speaker, who reflects on her own power and isolation.
Allusion Examples in Literature
While poets frequently utilize allusion examples, they are also a fixture in many literary works. Below, we’ve broken down some prominent allusion examples in literature:
8) Moby Dick by Herman Melville
“Call me Ishmael” is arguably one of the most well-known lines from literature. It is also one of the many allusion examples in Melville’s Moby Dick. Here, the name Ishmael is an allusion to a biblical figure. In Genesis, Ishmael is the oldest son of Abraham who is known as a wandering outcast within his family. This allusion may serve to emphasize the novel’s themes of alienation and humans’ search for meaning.
9) Moby Dick by Herman Melville (again!)
Melville’s novel is one of the most essential works in American literature for a reason. Part of its legacy stems from its complex, layered, and much-debated meaning, including its many allusions. Another example of allusion in the text is the name of the ship the novel takes place on: the Pequod. Contemporary readers of Moby Dick might have drawn connections between this name and the Pequot tribe, who are indigenous to modern-day Connecticut. From 1636 to 1638, members of this tribe engaged in the Pequot War with English settlers. This conflict ultimately had disastrous and long-lasting effects on the tribe. Melville’s allusion to this tribe and English colonization evokes a sense of conflict, echoing the novel’s broader themes about human nature and the effects of unchecked ambition.
Allusion Examples in Literature (Continued)
10) Jaws by Peter Benchley
Although many are now more familiar with Steven Spielberg’s film, Jaws originated as a novel, which was published in 1974. In his novel, Benchley tells the story of Martin Brody, a police chief who must contend with a killer shark. Throughout the novel, Benchley alludes to the character of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick through his characterization of Quint. Quint is a fisherman and shark hunter, whose pursuit of the shark mirrors Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. The fate of Quint’s character is one of the most prominent allusion examples in Jaws (spoiler ahead!). Like Ahab, Quint becomes entangled in harpoon ropes attached to the shark, which pulls him underwater to his death.
11) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Although many allusion examples reference literary works, they can also be historical in nature. This section of dialogue from To Kill a Mockingbird is a great example:
“Are we poor, Atticus?”
Atticus nodded. “We are indeed.”
Jem’s nose wrinkled. “Are we as poor as the Cunninghams”?
“Not exactly. The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest.”
In this passage, Lee uses “the crash” to allude to the 1929 stock market crash that caused the Great Depression. Recognizing this example of allusion would help the reader understand To Kill a Mockingbird’s social and historical context.
12) Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Arguably Shakespeare’s most famous play, Romeo and Juliet is also frequently alluded to in other works. How many times have you heard a couple in literature or film described as a pair of star-crossed lovers? However, like the majority of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, Romeo and Juliet also contains many allusion examples. One such example occurs in Act 1, Scene 1:
Well in that hit you miss. She’ll not be hit
With Cupid’s arrow. She hath Dian’s wit,
And, in strong proof of chastity well armed,
From love’s weak childish bow she lives uncharmed.
In this passage, Shakespeare alludes to two mythological figures. They include Cupid, the Roman god of love, and Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting, women, and childbirth. Romeo says the above lines in reference to his feelings for Rosaline and her lack of reciprocity. His allusion to Cupid speaks to this conflict, suggesting that even Cupid’s arrow can’t make Rosaline share Romeo’s feelings. Strengthening this allusion, Romeo also references Diana, a figure who vowed lifelong celibacy. By alluding to Diana, Romeo suggests that Rosaline is resolute in her decision not to pursue a relationship with him.
Allusion Examples in Literature (Continued)
13) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
A classic dystopian novel, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 offers both timely and timeless critiques of state-sponsored censorship. Bradbury’s text utilizes many allusion examples including the following historical allusion:
He was eating a light supper at nine in the evening when the front door cried out in the hall and Mildred ran from the parlor like a native feeling an eruption of Vesuvius.
Here, Bradbury references Mount Vesuvius, a volcano that famously buried the city of Pompeii in 79 A.D. Through this allusion, Bradbury suggested that Mildred felt panicked when she left the parlor.
14) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
A classic of Gothic literature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has become a fixture in many high school and college curricula. However, what many readers may not realize is that Frankenstein is not the full title of Shelley’s novel. When it was originally published, Shelley included a subtitle: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. That subtitle is, itself, an allusion that can help the reader understand the meaning of Shelley’s novel. Prometheus is a figure in Greek mythology, who created humans and gave them fire. This latter action angers Zeus, who dooms Prometheus to eternal punishment and torment. Recognizing this allusion can help readers see the parallels between Prometheus and Frankenstein, who also plays God by creating new life and, ultimately, suffers for it.
Allusion Examples in Literature (Continued)
15) Firestarter by Stephen King
Let’s conclude with a slightly more modern example. Stephen King is one of our most prolific contemporary writers, having published 65 novels and novellas. These include his 1980 novel, Firestarter, which tells the story of a young girl with pyrokinetic abilities. Included below is one allusion example from King’s novel:
Rainbird was a troll, an orc, a balrog of a man.
Fantasy genre enthusiasts will immediately recognize this allusion to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Orcs and the balrog are monstrous creatures that exist in Tolkien’s mythology. In describing Rainbird, a central antagonist in Firestarter, this way, King paints a portrait of a brutish and malevolent figure.
Final Thoughts: 15 Examples of Allusion
As these examples show, allusion is an extremely versatile device that appears in all writing genres. From a reader’s standpoint, allusion can also make a work more engaging, allowing you to draw connections between the media you have consumed. If you struggle to identify or understand allusion examples, that’s okay! It takes time and practice to learn how to identify and analyze allusions. Plus, as many of the aforementioned examples indicate, allusions frequently reference classic works, like the Bible, Shakespeare, and Greek myths. Refamiliarizing yourself with these works can make it significantly easier to notice allusions and incorporate them into your own writing. So, maybe it’s time to update your reading list?
Interested in studying the craft of writing? Consider reading the following posts: | |||||
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] | 2023-07-06T07:50:23-05:00 | The 25 films about the Holocaust listed below can all be found in the Boniuk Library collection. | en | Holocaust Museum Houston | https://hmh.org/about/25-films-about-holocaust/ | WOMAN IN GOLD (2015)
Sixty years after fleeing Vienna, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), an elderly Jewish woman, attempts to reclaim family possessions that were seized by the Nazis. Among them is a famous portrait of Maria’s beloved Aunt Adele: Gustave Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” With the help of young lawyer Randy Schoeberg (Ryan Reynolds), Maria embarks upon a lengthy legal battle to recover this painting and several others, but it will not be easy, for Austria considers them national treasures.
SARAH’S KEY (2010)
Sarah’s Key is one of the few entirely fictional films on the Holocaust, featuring a past and present layer of narrative. The past goes back to 1942, the year when the deportation of the French Jews began in Paris with the infamous Vel d’Hiv Roundup. Following the Strazynski family, whose daughter Sarah (Mélusine Mayance) left her little brother locked up behind a secret door at their home; the film represents the humiliating terror of this event particularly well. The present thread of the narrative follows Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), a journalist working on a story about the Roundup.
DEFIANCCE
DEFIANCE (2008)
In 1941, Nazi soldiers are slaughtering Eastern European Jews by the thousands. Three brothers, Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber) and Asael (Jamie Bell), manage to escape and take refuge in the forest where they played in childhood. Seeking a way to avenge the deaths of their loved ones, the brothers turn their daily struggle for survival into a battle against the Nazis. As news of their exploits spreads, others join the fray, willing to risk their lives for even brief freedom.
BLESSED IS THE MATCH: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HANNAH SENESH (2008)
In 1944, 22-year-old Hannah Senesh parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe with a small group of Jewish volunteers from Palestine. Theirs was the only military rescue mission for Jews that occurred in WWII. Narrated by Joan Allen, the film follows the remarkable journey of this young Hungarian poet and diarist, paratrooper and resistance fighter. Told through Hannah’s letters, diaries and poems, her mother’s memoirs, and the recollections of those who knew and loved her, the film trances her life from her childhood in Budapest to her time in Palestine. Both devastating and inspiring, the film offers an intimate portrait of a singularly talented, courageous and complex girl who believed that one person could be a flame that burns brightly in even the darkest hours.
FUGITIVE PIECES (2007)
“Fugitive Pieces” is a drama directed by Jeremy Podeswa, adapted from the award-winning novel of the same name written by Anne Michaels. It tells the story of Jakob Beer, orphaned in Poland during World War II and saved by a Greek archaeologist. Starring Nina Dobrev and Stephen Dillane, this beautifully portrayed quest for liberation from haunting memories and loss and for love and redemption spans three continents and three generations. Particularly moving is the portrayal of the bond established between the boy and his rescuer, who are very different kinds of refugees, and the historical metaphors that help ground them in the world of the living.
CONSTANTINE’S SWORD (2007)
Author and former priest James Carroll explores his past and confronts religion’s history of violence committed in the name of God. Carroll focuses on Catholic and evangelical anti-Judaism, and invokes the cross as a symbol of the long history of Christian xenophobic violence against Jews and non-Christians, from the Crusades, through the Roman Inquisition and the creation of the Jewish ghetto, to the Holocaust.
FATELESS (2007)
Fateless is a rare example of a Hungarian film achieving international success. In 1944, 14-year-old Hungarian Jew Gyorgy Koves quits school to look after his family when his father is deported by the Nazis to a labor camp. Shortly afterward, Gyorgy is seized during a police raid and sent to Auschwitz. Lying about his age to prevent himself from being gassed with the other children, Gyorgy learns from veteran prisoner Bandi Citrom how to survive as he is sent from one concentration camp to another.
THE RITCHIE BOYS (2004)
The Ritchie Boys is the riveting, untold story of a group of young men who fled Nazi Germany and returned as soldiers in U.S. uniforms. They knew the psychology and the language of the enemy better than anyone. In Camp Ritchie, Maryland, they were trained in intelligence and psychological warfare. Determined, bright, and inventive, they fought their own kind of war; they were victors, not victims.
THE PIANIST (2003)
Hollywood’s adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman autobiography, “The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945,” was a critical smash that won three Oscars. The story is a tragic first-person account as to how Warsaw gradually changes at the beginning of World War II. Szpilman, who is played by a very gaunt Adrien Brody, is eventually forced into the Warsaw Ghetto and separated from his family during Operation Reinhard. The film won director Roman Polanksi his only Oscar for Best Director and also won best adapted screenplay for Ronald Harwood. “The Pianist” is a true tear-jerker that stands the test of time as a great film for its honest and harrowing human portrayal of life under oppression and serves as a brutal reminder for how quickly freedom can be taken away.
AMEN (2002)
Kurt Gerstein is an SS officer employed in the SS Hygiene Institute, planning programs for water purification and destruction of pests. He is horrified to discover that the process he has developed to fight diseases like typhus using a hydrogen cyanide mixture called Zyklon B is being used to kill Jews in the camps. In this movie, directed by Costa Gavras, Gerstein pleads to the pope to stop the genocide, with the help of a young priest, to no avail. In yet another ugly display of human behavior during this dark period of history, the movie draws a disturbing picture of the Vatican’s silence regarding the Holocaust.
THE GREY ZONE (2001)
Based on actual events, “The Grey Zone” is the staggeringly powerful story of the Auschwitz’s twelfth Sonderkommando — one of the thirteen consecutive “Special Squads” of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of helping to kill fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life. From inside the working organs of the infamous Auschwitz death camp, this film asks to what terrible lengths we are willing to go to save our own lives.
CONSPIRACY (2001)
This HBO film is a slow gut-punch of a movie the depicts in eerie detail the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, where senior Nazi officials met to discuss and decided upon the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The film, which is set almost entirely around a dining room table converted into a conference table stars Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth. As the film develops the attendees at the meeting slowly begin to understand that their various mandates in dealing with Jews in Europe has evolved from deportation and evacuation to annihilation. Several of the meeting’s attendees hold out, but are slowly either cajoled or intimidated into supporting the plan, which they learn is already in action as gas chambers and extermination camps are already being built to annihilate an estimated 11 million Jews – including Russian Jews.
INTO THE ARMS OF STRANGERS: STORIES OF THE KINDER-TRANSPORT (2000)
For nine months prior to World War II, in an act of mercy unequalled anywhere else before the war, Britain conducted an extraordinary rescue mission, opening its doors to over 10,000 Jewish and other children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. These children, or Kinder (sing. Kind), as they came to be known, were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. The majority of them never saw their families again.
THE DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC (1999)
Hannah Stern, played by Kirsten Dunst, is a young Jewish girl living in the United States in the late 20th century. On Passover eve, she is bored with the Seder and at one point complains she’s tired of remembering. When she opens the door for the prophet Elijah, she finds herself in Poland in 1942. Deported to a concentration camp and in the face of near-impossible odds, Hannah calls on all her inner resources – including hope and friendship – to survive. Based on a novel by Jane Yolen, the film was directed by Donna Deitch. (Rahel Jaskow)
THE LAST DAYS (1998)
In late 1944, even as they faced imminent defeat, the Nazis expended enormous resources to kill or deport over 425,000 Jews during the “cleansing” of Hungary. This Oscar-winning documentary, executive produced by Steven Spielberg, focuses on the plight of five Hungarian Jews who survived imprisonment in Auschwitz. Though these survivors recount the horrors they witnessed and endured as a result of the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” their individual triumphs are a testament to hope and humanity.
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997)
On its release, “Life is Beautiful” was hotly debated for having the audacity to employ humor in its treatment of the Holocaust. But that is how its protagonist, the Jewish-Italian waiter Guido, always navigated life, so why stop when he and his son are sent to a concentration camp? Both director Roberto Benigni (who co-wrote the script) and his onscreen character have an insatiable zest for life, helping to explain the film’s schizophrenia: It builds slowly from charming romance to Holocaust drama, delivering, from start to finish, a tour de force of the human spirit. Co-starring Nicoletta Braschi.
SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993)
Businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) arrives in Krakow in 1939, ready to make his fortune from World War II, which has just started. After joining the Nazi party primarily for political expediency, he staffs his factory with Jewish workers for similarly pragmatic reasons. When the SS begins killing Jews in the Krakow ghetto, Schindler arranges to have his workers protected to keep his factory in operation, but soon realizes that in so doing, he is also saving innocent lives.
EUROPA EUROPA (1990)
Europa Europa is also based on a true account, of a Jewish boy who masqueraded as a Nazi Party activist to survive the Holocaust. Directed by Agnieszka Holland, who dealt with the Holocaust in several previous films, it tells the story of Solomon Perel, played by Marco Hofschneider. The family escapes to Poland but after its conquest by Germany, Solek is separated from family and lives in an orphanage. When the Nazis arrive, he ditches his papers, declares himself to be “Josef Peters”, an ethnic German and joins their forces in the war with Russia. He is sent to a Hitler Youth school, is almost shot by victorious Russian forces but survives the war – and reaches Israel. The movie won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS (1987)
Director Louis Malle recalls his experiences as a child forever impacted by a friendship that ends in a most horrific way. In 1943 France, upperclass boarding student Julien (Gaspard Manesse) meets, and initially detests, new student Jean (Raphael Fejto). However, the two eventually become good friends, and Julien discovers a secret: Jean is one of several Jewish children the priest running the school is hiding from Nazi police. What unfolds is a beautiful story of friendship that is ripped apart when the Gestapo is tipped off, and Julien unwittingly betrays his friend. The film ends with Malle’s voiceover: “More than 40 years have passed, but I’ll remember every second of that January morning until the day I die.”
SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982)
Stingo (Peter MacNicol), a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie (Meryl Streep) and her lover Nathan (Kevin Kline), he learns that Sophie is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan’s relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan’s fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.
THE PAWNBROKER (1964)
After witnessing the fates of his wife and children at the hands of Nazis, Holocaust survivor Sol (Rod Steiger, in an outstanding Oscar-nominated performance) has become a bitter and detached man. Now running a pawn shop in Harlem, he suffers flashbacks to his time in the concentration camp, causing an emotional detachment that results in tragedy in the present. Sidney Lumet’s haunting tale is credited with being the first American film to show the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor, and continues to be influential and relevant today.
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (1959)
What more can be said about the young Jewish girl who lived in hiding, fearing for her life and the lives of her family members and friends, but also eloquently wrote of hope and belief in the kindness of man? This adaptation of her firsthand account of the events surrounding the Holocaust is considered to be the finest adaptation of her diary, with Millie Perkins giving a poignant portrayal of the inspirational girl, and Shelley Winters winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a fellow Jew in hiding.
NIGHT AND FOG (1956)
Short documentary film that was made ten years after the liberation of German concentration camps. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek established in occupied Poland while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. “Night and Fog” was made in collaboration with scriptwriter Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. The first part of “Night and Fog” shows remnants of Auschwitz while the narrator describes the rise of Nazi ideology. The film continues with comparisons of the life of the Schutzstaffel to the starving prisoners in the camps and their terrible ordeals. The final topic of the film depicts the liberation of the country, the discovery of the horror of the camps, and the questioning of who was responsible for them. | |||||
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] | null | [] | 2020-11-06T18:52:28+00:00 | Are you struggling to choose the right genre for your next bestseller? The top 5 most popular book genres that will attract more readers to your work are ... | en | //theurbanwriters.com/cdn/shop/files/dibblyfavicon_32x32.png?v=1709564437 | The Urban Writers | https://theurbanwriters.com/blogs/publishing/popular-book-genres-for-your-next-bestseller | Confused about what book to write? The best place to start is by picking the right genre.
The only problem is that there are so many genres out there. It can be rather overwhelming.
Don’t stress; we’ve got you covered! We have the current trending literary genres you can try out right here!
What Is a Genre?
Before we dive into what genre sells the most books, let’s discuss what a genre is. A genre is just a category in which your book falls. This will be evident in the underlying theme and storyline of your book. It helps readers decide what books they would most likely enjoy.
Someone who loves romance books won’t want to read a book where the hero doesn’t fall in love with the man of her dreams. In the same way, someone who picks up a crime book is not going to be too happy if the book is focused on the relationship between the detective and the witness instead of actually solving the crime.
Now, you definitely can have different elements of multiple genres in your book.
So don’t think that if you picked romance, for instance, you can’t have an element of crime, mystery, or sci-fi laced throughout the book. You most certainly can! But the overarching theme and the thing that will be highlighted will be the romance. The same goes for every genre
How to Pick the Right Genre for You
Picking the right genre for your book might seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be.
When you are thinking about the genre you want to write in, you are targeting a specific audience. So, think about:
Who you want to reach?
What does your ideal reader look like?
What would they like to get out of the book?
Once you have these answers, you can develop your book. The best way to understand what a reader wants is to read the most popular books in that genre. All genres have bestselling books. The reason is that those books gave the reader what they wanted.
Another great tip is just to write what you enjoy reading. You probably already have a specific genre you are drawn to or that you always find yourself picking up.
This is your preferred genre and will be perfect for you to write in. You are already familiar with the writing style and direction of the storyline.
For non-fiction books, the genres are not as broad. Here, you can write about a topic you are familiar with or passionate about. If you have a skill or idea you would like to teach people, then writing a non-fiction book is the way to go.
Subgenres
There is no way a reader will like every book in a specific genre. It’s just too broad, which is why subgenres exist. They help guide the reader into a more specific book niches
Picking your books subgenre is just as important as picking the genre. It will help you write in a specific direction that will appeal to a certain type of reader.
There are so many different subgenres for each genre, so you are definitely going to have to do your research. Chances are that you already have a subgenre preference, even if you don’t know it yet.
Really analyze the books you commonly read and see if there is a common theme. If you find it difficult to pick out the subgenre, try doing a quick Google search. You should be able to find out the subgenre in no time.
Why Choose a Popular Book Genre?
Genres help readers pick books they would like to read. People naturally gravitate to the types of books they have enjoyed previously. Once a book becomes popular, people look for other books in the same genre. This is how genres grow in popularity.
You can really boost the profitability of your book if you pick a current popular book genre. More people will be interested in picking it up. This means more potential readers for your book.
Places like Amazon and Play Books commonly suggest books to readers based on what they have read. So, writing a book in a genre that people are interested in reading could really increase traffic to it.
What Genres Sell the Most Books Right Now?
When making this list, we have also taken into account subgenres. Take a look at them and see if the book you want to write falls into any of these categories.
1. Romance – Contemporary and Historical
Romance is consistently one of the top-selling book genres and has been so for many years. In fact, it has never fallen out of the top 5 bestselling book genres.
Romance books are categorized by having an emotionally satisfying and often positive ending. These books take the reader on a journey where they become invested in the characters’ love story.
There are many subgenres in romance that are constantly fighting for the top spot. Right now, the most popular subgenres are contemporary romance and historical romance.
Contemporary romance is set in the present time. Anything set anytime after World War II would qualify. Because it is more current, you are free to explore the themes and ideas of current events. Some examples of these are Me Before You by Jojo Moyes and The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
Historical romance, on the other hand, is set anytime before 1945. The plot of these books relies on a solid portrayal of the era it is set in. Think Outlander by Diana Gabaldon and An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole.
2. Crime and Thriller
Crime/thriller and romance seem to be the two most popular genres for fiction books. They are always competing for the top spot. It has to do with the emotions they evoke.
While romance gives readers a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, thrillers engulf the reader in the darker side of life. This is exactly what readers want when they pick up the likes of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn or basically anything by Lee Child.
When people speak of a page turner, it is usually a book falling in this category. If written well, readers can burn through these books faster than most others. I mean, who isn’t curious to find out who had done it!
3. Religious and Self-help
These types of books have a huge following, both as ebooks and printed copies. People are more interested than ever in improving themselves.
Religious books are basically self-help books, but they are founded on religious doctrine. Of course, your readers will be those who follow that religion you are writing about.
If you are planning on writing a book in this genre, think about information that would be helpful to people. There are so many options here that you are only limited by yourself, your own ideas, and experiences.
Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty, The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, and You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero all fall under this category.
4. Children’s Books – Humor
Children’s books are massively popular in both print and ebook versions. Children typically read more books than adults. This is because it is fun for them to get lost in an imaginary world. Anything that sparks a child’s sense of adventure and creativity is something they will enjoy reading.
The sweet spot, in terms of age, is children between the ages of 8 and 12, but even books for younger kids are still very popular. Knowing the trends and characters children are loving will help you write a children’s book that will captivate your young readers.
Adding humor to kids books is a rising trend. Kids love to laugh and so do the parents who will definitely be reading the book as well! Having a funny element really captures the child’s attention. The BFG by Roald Dahl is a great example of this.
But honestly, who doesn't love a good laugh?!
5. Fantasy and Sci-fi – Young Adult
Readers of this genre are incredibly loyal to it. There are many subgenres, but the books geared towards young adults have become the most popular. Most of the stories in these books take place in other worlds or in this world but with a twist.
About half of the books on the 20 bestselling books of all time are from this genre. Think The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe.
If you are worried that you will have to compete with these huge titles, then there is some good news for you. About 48% of this genre’s total book sales were either self-published or Amazon published.
Bonus Tip: Strong Female Lead
There has definitely been a rising demand for books with a strong female lead. Books that have an empowered heroine in it are getting attention. This is across all genres and niches, and we are here for it!
Kids are looking for female role models to look up to and adults are looking for someone to inspire them. Because of the lack of strong female leads in the past, it is understandable why representation is being asked for.
Final Thoughts
Picking the right genre can definitely help boost your book sales, but there’s more to it than just picking the top trending literary genre. Make sure that whatever you decide to write will capture your audience and give them what they are looking for.
Choose a genre that you know you will be able to write well. This way you can build a following of loyal readers who always enjoy your books. If your book falls into one of these categories, then that’s a huge bonus for you!
And even if it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean you should scrap your book and start anew! The best piece of advice is to write something you would be proud of and would enjoy reading. | ||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 72 | https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/oct/26/-sp-female-academics-dont-power-dress-forget-heels-and-no-flowing-hair-allowed | en | Female academics: don't power dress, forget heels – and no flowing hair allowed | [
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] | 2014-10-26T00:00:00 | Women in academia are judged on their appearance. Feminine means frivolous, and those considered scruffy are subject to sexist assumptions | en | the Guardian | https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/oct/26/-sp-female-academics-dont-power-dress-forget-heels-and-no-flowing-hair-allowed | Jonathan Wolff’s column about the way academics dress caused uproar on my Twitter and Facebook feeds this week. And rightly so. Despite occasionally acknowledging that some academics might be women, his comments betrayed his assumption that academics are male, for apparently their default uniform comprises trousers, a jacket, a shirt and a tie.
But the most galling thing about his assumption is that in one way, he’s right: masculine dress is the standard academic uniform, for academia remains an overtly male domain. As a result, female academics find their appearance scrutinised in ways a male colleague would rarely encounter.
It’s well known that the suit conveys authority and power in the workplace in overtly masculine ways. You only need to look at the tie, pointing insistently to the male crotch, to recognise this.
So when a man wears a suit, he is simply adopting the standard uniform of a conventional authoritative masculinity, as Grayson Perry recently noted in his description of the great white male. But if this form of dress is also the default academic uniform, what should a female academic wear?
In my experience, many choose to adopt feminine adaptations of the standard uniform: a shirt and jacket, with a smart skirt or trousers. This can be a help at conferences, when the obligatory name badges still tend to sit in holders designed to be clipped to a man’s jacket pocket or lapel, rather than hung from a lanyard around the neck. But I’ve been told by some women – particularly junior colleagues – that they dress like this in order to be “taken seriously”.
The implication is that dressing in a more conventionally feminine way is somehow more frivolous, and can undermine perceptions of a woman’s intellectual and professional skills. Dressing in order to be taken seriously indicates that the spectre of older, more explicit forms of sexism still hovers over us: a woman who adopts a more feminine style is too preoccupied with pretty things to be a serious academic, because a woman can’t be both attractive and intelligent – if indeed she can be intelligent at all.
But even when a woman wears a suit in the academic area, she’s not immune from similarly loaded and critical assumptions. I’ve overheard conversations at academic gatherings in which female colleagues have been described as “power-dressing” – coded language used to accuse a woman of asserting herself in overly-ambitious ways.
How different it is for a male academic! When he wears a suit, he’s simply perceived to be professionally and smartly dressed. He doesn’t need to “power-dress”: by virtue of his being a man, he is already powerful.
This is why a male academic can afford to look scruffy if he chooses: no one will question his intellectual or professional authority. Male academics who wear jeans, hoodies and t-shirts are “lads” to their students, and “good blokes” to their colleagues. Older men who wear scuffed shoes and a fraying tweed jacket, accidentally accessorized with a splodge of egg yolk down their tie, are “eccentric” or “distractedly intellectual”.
But a female academic who looks similarly casual, or scruffy, or unkempt, risks becoming the target of a range of sexist assumptions: she must be a student, or a mother distracted from the job by childcare, or a woman too old to need to bother about her appearance.
These assumptions are obviously not isolated. The unspoken dress-codes of academia are simply a reflection of the wider policing of women’s bodies in other professional contexts in western society. No matter what their occupation, women are still frequently held to account for their appearance, rather than only their expertise and experience.
Like an increasing number of female academics, I refuse to wear the male uniform. And as a result, I’ve sometimes been criticised or advised by both men and women (academic and non-academic) when it comes to my appearance.
I dress smartly but not formally for work. I wear what I’m comfortable in – both physically and socially. But for some, my heels are too high. My hair is too long. My smart jeans are too modern. Apparently, for some people I look too “glamorous”, or too “feminine”, to be an academic.
At a conference a few years ago, a senior female professor suggested I should wear long skirts or looser trousers and tie my hair back (or better, put it up altogether) because attendees would be able to concentrate more carefully on what I was saying.
Even when I’ve stepped into the media in my role as an academic, my appearance has caused confusion, leading one TV critic to remark: “Clearly whoever commissioned a three-part series on Biblical scholarship for BBC2 was entirely indifferent to the fact that it would be presented by someone who looks as if she’s shimmied out of one of the hotter passages of the Song of Solomon”.
Essentially, the message is the same: unless women dress modestly and conservatively, they look out of place in academia, because fundamentally, they don’t have the right bodies to be academic authorities.
This infuriates me, and I refuse to accept it. My intellectual abilities as an academic should be judged on my work: my research, my publications, and my lectures. This is how I have earned and now own my place in academia, regardless – or in spite of – my “feminine” appearance.
Francesca Stavrakopoulou is professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the University of Exeter – follow her on Twitter @ProfFrancesca
More like this: My university life as a woman professor
Why women leave academia and why universities should be worried
Academics Anonymous: sexism is driving women out of science | |||||
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] | 2010-02-26T00:00:00+00:00 | The Bad and the Beautiful, American film drama, released in 1952, that—highlighted by an Academy Award-nominated performance by Kirk Douglas—helped solidify the unflattering popular image of the ruthless Hollywood mogul. The film, most of which is told in flashback, traces the rise and fall of | en | /favicon.png | Encyclopedia Britannica | https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Bad-and-the-Beautiful | The Bad and the Beautiful, American film drama, released in 1952, that—highlighted by an Academy Award-nominated performance by Kirk Douglas—helped solidify the unflattering popular image of the ruthless Hollywood mogul.
The film, most of which is told in flashback, traces the rise and fall of Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields (played by Douglas), who achieves fame and fortune but surrenders his humanity in the process. Three of his “victims”—an actress (Lana Turner), a director (Barry Sullivan), and a screenwriter (Dick Powell)—recount their relationship with Shields, who has asked them to work on a project that he hopes will lead to his comeback.
Britannica Quiz
Best Picture Movie Quote Quiz
The Bad and the Beautiful was originally titled Tribute to a Badman, but the change was made to accommodate a reference to Turner (the “beautiful”). In addition to being noted for the acting, the film was praised for its cinematography. There has long been debate as to which Hollywood stars were the models for the various fictional characters. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 92 | https://www.sundance.org/blogs/news/sundance-institute-and-film-forward-advancing-cultural-dialogue-return-toda/ | en | Sundance Institute and FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue Return Today to Colombia (Bogota, B | [
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] | 2013-03-18T00:00:00-07:00 | Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced today that the second trip for FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue in Colombia began with a free screening at a binational center in Medellín. The trip will continue through March 23 with free film screenings of eight different films, panel discussions, artist roundtables, events at Javeriana University, Casa de la Cultura de Ciudad Bolivar and Antioquia University as well as guided discussions with filmmakers Nancy Buirski and Jeff Orlowski. Sundance Channel Global is an official sponsor of the FILM FORWARD program in Colombia. | en | sundance.org - sundance.org | https://www.sundance.org/blogs/news/sundance-institute-and-film-forward-advancing-cultural-dialogue-return-toda/ | Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced today that the second trip for FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue in Colombia began with a free screening at a binational center in Medellín. The trip will continue through March 23 with free film screenings of eight different films, panel discussions, artist roundtables, events at Javeriana University, Casa de la Cultura de Ciudad Bolivar and Antioquia University as well as guided discussions with filmmakers Nancy Buirski and Jeff Orlowski. Sundance Channel Global is an official sponsor of the FILM FORWARD program in Colombia. For a full schedule of events visit sundance.org/filmforward.
FILM FORWARD, a partnership of Sundance Institute and U.S. federal cultural agencies, is a touring program that offers film screenings, workshops and discussions designed to foster dialogue and cross-cultural understanding. It uses the power of cinema to promote broader cultural understanding, inspire curiosity, foster dialogue and enhance awareness of shared stories and values across generations, language, education and borders. The partnering federal agencies are the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Institute of Museum and Library Services.
“Sundance Institute is pleased to return to Colombia with this FILM FORWARD program of eight films, each of which explores universal issues that touch us all,” said Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam. “It is our hope that this collection of films and events exposes audiences to worlds they might not otherwise experience.”
“Making The Loving Story without a narrator was designed to allow audiences to observe the film’s subjects, feel how they feel and draw their own conclusions. I have found each time it screens that audiences have applied new meaning to the film beyond basic human rights,” said Director Nancy Buirski. “I’m excited to meet audiences in Colombia through the FILM FORWARD program, to discuss the themes that unify us all.”
“The imagery captured in Chasing Ice is beautiful and captivating, so my hope is that audiences will see the film and engage in dialogue about the environment on a global level,” said Director Jeff Orlowski. “I am excited to connect with audiences in Colombia through the FILM FORWARD program to talk about the measurable changes the globe is experiencing.”
FILM FORWARD’s primary audience is communities without ready access to independent films, students, and the local filmmaking community in each region. Common themes explored in the films include issues surrounding family, friendship and community, as well as the intersection of tradition and modern culture.
Sundance Institute Senior Programmer David Courier, FILM FORWARD Consultant Jill Miller and FILM FORWARD Manager Jacqueline Carlson will travel with the program.
Following FILM FORWARD’s visit to Colombia, upcoming destinations include: Jordan (April 13-18); China/Taiwan (May 17-26); Puerto Rico (June 10-15); Washington (September 4-7); Bosnia & Herzegovina (September 20-27); and Maine (September 30 – October 4). Completed programs include Imperial Valley, CA, and Mexicali, Mexico.
FILM FORWARD Year Three Films:
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Director: Benh Zeitlin) — In a forgotten but defiant bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee, a six-year-old girl exists on the brink of orphanhood. Buoyed by her childish optimism and extraordinary imagination, she believes that the natural order is in balance with the universe until a fierce storm changes her reality. Desperate to repair the structure of her world in order to save her ailing father and sinking home, this tiny hero must learn to survive unstoppable catastrophes of epic proportions. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography (Director: Stacy Peralta) — A gang of disenfranchised kids reject mainstream culture, channel their controlled desperation into a loser activity and redefine winning in the process. Mentored by a former world champion skateboarder, the “Bones Brigade” became history’s most influential skateboarding team. Their countercultural impact continues to affect change with best selling video games and books and millions of kids who embrace skateboarding around the world. Chasing Ice (Director: Jeff Orlowski) — Acclaimed
environmental photographer James Balog was once a skeptic about climate change. But through his Extreme Ice Survey, he discovers undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Chasing Ice reveals Balog’s hauntingly beautiful, multi-year time-lapse videos of vanishing glaciers across the Arctic, all while delivering fragile hope to our carbon-powered planet. La Misma Luna (Under The Same Moon) (Director: Patricia Riggen) — Even across thousands of miles, the special bond between a mother and son can never be broken. It gives hope to Carlitos, a scrappy nine-year-old boy whose mother, Rosario, has gone to America to build a better life for both of them. While Rosario struggles for a brighter future, fate forces Carlitos’ hand and he embarks on an extraordinary journey to find her.
The Light in Her Eyes (Directors: Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix) — Houda al-Habash, a conservative woman preacher in Damascus, Syria, calls girls to the practice of Islam, teaching them that pursuing their ambitions is a way of worshipping God. Shot right before the uprising in Syria erupted, The Light in Her Eyes offers an extraordinary portrait of a leader who challenges the women of her community to live according to Islam, without giving up their dreams.
The Loving Story (Director: Nancy Buirski) — A racially-charged criminal trial and a heart-rending love story converge in this documentary about Mildred and Richard Loving, a part-black, part-Indian woman married to a white man in Jim Crow-era Virginia. Thrown into rat-infested jails and exiled from their hometown for 25 years, the Lovings fought back and changed history. Town of Runners (Director: Jerry Rothwell) — Town of Runners is a feature documentary about young people from the Ethiopian rural town of Bekoji, whose runners have won 10 Olympic Gold medals in the last 20 years. The film tells the story of three teenagers who want to follow in their heroes’ footsteps, as they move from school track to national competition and from childhood to adulthood, trying to run their way to a different life. Valley of Saints (Director and screenwriter: Musa Syeed) — Using Kashmir’s picturesque Dal Lake as its backdrop and underpinned by the political unrest in the region, this moving drama explores the relationship between two best friends and the female researcher studying environmental degradation who threatens to distract them from their dreams of escape.
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. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: neh.gov.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Our mission is to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement. Our grant making, policy development, and research help libraries and museums deliver valuable services that make it possible for communities and individuals to thrive. To learn more, visit imls.gov and follow @US_IMLS on Twitter and on Facebook.
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.
About Sundance Channel GlobalDedicated to founder Robert Redford’s mission to celebrate creativity, Sundance Channel is the television destination for independent-minded viewers seeking something different. Bold, imaginative and uncompromising, Sundance Channel offers audiences a diverse and engaging selection of high-quality independent films, documentaries and original programs. In addition to being widely distributed throughout North America, Sundance Channel is available throughout Europe and Asia. Owned and operated by AMC Networks Inc., Sundance Channel is a highly recognizable and magnetic brand that is available in HD and across multiple platforms.
# # #
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 | 0 | 66 | https://archives.nypl.org/21463 | en | Lillian Gish papers | [] | [] | [] | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | /assets/favicon-76261cdf5100cf81ab30579f0da7bf0ff11969948a72f8d62cb0af6b46ee1e4e.ico | null | Lilllian Gish, legendary star of the silent film era, was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1893. Although best known as one of the earliest stars of the nascent film industry, Lillian Gish began as a child trouper on the stage with her sister Dorothy and their mother. At the age of five, she made her first appearance in a melodrama In Convict Stripes. A chance meeting in 1912 with another child actress Gladys Smith, who became world renowned as Mary Pickford, brought her and Dorothy to the attention of D. W. Griffith, a pioneering director in silent film days. She soon became his leading star, achieving stardom in his productions of Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), and most notably in Orphans of the Storm (1922), playing opposite her sister Dorothy. She was the perfect Griffith heroine, revealing a strong will and intelligence under a fragile, almost ethereal exterior.
She parted company with Griffith over a salary dispute, later joining MGM in 1925. One of the few stars to have control over story and director, Gish made only two successful movies at MGM, La Bohéme and The Scarlet Letter. Overshadowed by the rising prominence of Greta Garbo, she left MGM and made a few films as an independent. She then decided to return to the Broadway stage and found the right vehicle in director Jed Harris's production of Uncle Vanya in 1930. Her success in the play led to other starring roles, among them Ophelia opposite John Gielgud in the 1936 production of Hamlet. Thereafter, she never lacked for roles on Broadway and worked steadily as a stage actress until 1973.
In 1968, she suffered a personal blow when her sister Dorothy, with whom she was extremely close throughout her life, died. From time to time, she returned to the movies and also appeared on television from the 1950s to the 1970s, making her final appearance on screen in the movie The Whales of August in 1987. In 1970, she was awarded a special Oscar for her lifetime contributions to motion pictures. Lillian Gish died in 1993 in her hundredth year. She recorded the account of her life in Life and Lillian Gish (1932), The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (1969) and Dorothy and Lillian Gish (1973).
Chronology of Selected Events in the life of Lillian Gish
Lillian Gish born
Met and started working for D. W. Griffith
Judith of Bethulia ; Folly of Anne
Birth of a Nation
Intolerance
Travels to Europe to film British propaganda film Hearts of the World
Hearts of the World
Broken Blossoms
Directs her first film Remodeling Her Husband
Way Down East
Orphans of the Storm
The White Sister
Romola
Lawsuit with Charles Duell and Inspiration Pictures
La Bohème
Albert Bigelow Paine is contracted to write Lillian Gish biography
Camille
Hamlet
Life With Father
Duel in the Sun
Mary (Mae) Gish dies
Night of the Hunter
Opening of Congress Hall in Berlin - special ANTA performance starring Lillian Gish and many others
The Unforgiven
Romeo and Juliet - American Shakespeare Festival
Contracts with Disney for Follow Me! Boys
Worked on The Comedians in Africa
Dorothy Gish dies
Lecture tour Lillian Gish and the Movies
The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me published
Receives Oscar for lifetime work in motion pictures
Dorothy and Lillian Gish published
Whales of August
Lillian Gish dies
The Lillian Gish papers (75 lf.) span the years 1909-1992 and consist of correspondence including letters from friends, family, fans and business associates, personal papers, business, legal and financial documents, scripts, writings, photographs including early D.W. Griffith silent film photographs both candid shots taken during shooting and film stills, portraits by famous photographers, personal and family photographs, publicity and production photographs and snapshots, scrapbooks on the careers of both Dorothy and Lillian Gish, programs for early silent films and theatrical productions, clippings and ephemera that document the life and career of Lillian and Dorothy Gish from the early 1900's until Lillian's death in 1993. The collection contains information about the personal and professional lives of both the Gish sisters and many biographical bits of information about their family and friends as well. The papers are valuable documentation not only for the early days of film and the theater of the 20th century, but also for the broad scope of friends and acquaintances who corresponded regularly with Lillian Gish and influenced all aspects of 20th century life, history and culture. Gish's correspondents included statesmen, writers, ambassadors, housewives, professors, critics, playwrights, actors, producers, directors, photographers, soldiers, children and students. The materials in the collection document broad aspects of 20th century social history including politics, current events, journalism, performing arts, daily life and culture. Missing from the collection is any significant correspondence from George Jean Nathan.
The correspondence series, containing approximately 10,000 letters, not only gives an intimate view of the theater and film industries of the 20th century but also reveals the variety of relationships in her life including friend, sister, film idol and professional colleague. In her personal correspondence there are not only letters from her childhood friend, Nell Dorr, but also her replies to Nell, which were likely returned to her after Nell Dorr's death. Similarly, there is a series of letters from Laura McCullaugh, a long-time friend of Lillian and Dorothy who was Dorothy's companion in Rapallo, Italy until her death in 1968. Other correspondents include: George Abbott, James Abbe, Rodney Ackland, Mary Astor, Brooke Astor, Brooks Atkinson, Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont, Romney Brent, Kevin Brownlow, Huntington Cairns, Ronald Colman, Katharine Cornell, Noel Coward, Nell Dorr, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gielgud, Dorothy Gish, Peter Glenville, Ruth Gordon, Helen Hayes, Lucy and Nathan Kroll, Emmet Lavery, James MacArthur, Maurice Maeterlinck, Sir Ian Malcolm, H.L. Menken, Una Merkel, Colleen Moore, George Jean Nathan, Sean and Eileen O'Casey, Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill, Albert Bigelow Paine, Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers, Cyril Ritchard, Herb Sterne, Gloria Vanderbilt, Edward Wagenknecht, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams and Alexander Woollcott, among others.
The personal papers include appointment books and notebooks; biographical materials, including testimonials to Lillian Gish and family genealogical data; personal data including dress size and phone and address lists; medical papers; Dorothy's Gish estate papers. Other items included are inspirational writings and invitations including 2 inaugural invitations from Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
Legal and financial papers contain information on her real estate matters in New York, Masillion, Ohio and California. Included in the legal files are the papers dealing with the breach of contract lawsuit filed against her by Charles Duell and Inspiration Pictures in 1924.
The photograph series, over 4000 items, is a large part of the collection and contains photographs pertaining to the life and careers of both Lillian and Dorothy Gish. There are many portrait photographs done by well known artists such as James Abbe, Charles Albin, Kenneth Alexander, Apeda Studios, Cecil Beaton, Nell Dorr, John Engstead, Friedman-Abeles, Hartsook, Roddy McDowall, Ben Pinchot, Maurice Seymour, Talbot, Vandamm, Edward Steichen, Carl Van Vechten, White Studios and Witzel, among others.
Production photographs include a large collection of photographs of her days with D.W. Griffith and the silent film era as well as photographs of theatrical and other film roles. Some titles include: Her First False Step, An Unseen Enemy (1912), The Saving Grace (1914), The Birth of a Nation (1915), Enoch Arden (1915), The Lily and the Rose (1915), Daphne and the Pirate (1916), Intolerance (1916), Sold for Marriage(1916), Hearts of the World(1918), Broken Blossoms (1919), I'll Get Him Yet (1919), Peppy Polly (1919), Flying Pat (1920), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1922), The White Sister (1923), Romola (1924), La Bohème (1926), The Scarlet Letter (1926), Nell Gwyn (1926), Annie Laurie (1927), Tip Toes (1927), The Enemy (1928), The Wind (1928), One Romantic Night(1930), Camille (1932), Hamlet (1936), Life with Father (1939-1940), Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1944), The Magnificent Yankee (1946), Duel in the Sun (1947), Trip to Bountiful (1953), The Cobweb (1955), Night of the Hunter (1955), The Unforgiven (1960) and Uncle Vanya (1973), among others.
Remaining materials in this series consist of art photographs by Nell Dorr of her family and friends, 2 photographic scrapbooks containing platinum prints for production of Camille, family photographs and photograph scrapbooks of Lillian and Dorothy Gish and autographed photographs of friends and professional acquaintances.
Professional Work Files include correspondence, contracts, programs and other ephemera dealing with films, plays and public appearances made by Lillian Gish throughout her life. Materials on Way Down East, The Birth of a Nation and many others are included.
Writings in the collection are primarily from Lillian Gish's original work entitled Silver Glory. This manuscript evolved through time to become The Movies, Mr Griffith and Me, her book about D. W. Griffith and the silent film era; Infinity in an Hour, a television program which dealt with the same topic; and a lecture series Lillian Gish and the Movies, also with the same focus. Other writings in the collection include speeches and lectures by Lillian Gish as well as writings by others which she collected.
Presentation items from fans and friends contain poetry, cards, writings, handmade books and other ephemeral materials proclaiming the love and devotion felt by so many towards Lillian Gish.
Scrapbooks consist of 33 volumes of clippings on the careers of Lillian and Dorothy Gish. These scrapbooks primarily document the period between 1914 and 1940. Some production scrapbooks include: Star Wagon, Young Love, Life With Father, Nell Gwyn, Beautiful City and Clothes Make the Pirate, among others.
The Lillian Gish papers are arranged in fourteen series:
39 boxes 10 reels microfilm
This series contains letters from Lillan Gish's family and close friends, business associates and fans spanning 1909 until her death in 1993. The series is divided into 5 sub-series: Family Correspondence; Nell Dorr Correspondence; Laura McCullaugh Correspondence; Albert Bigelow Paine Correspondence and General Correspondence. Boxes 1-10 are available on microfilm only. The classmark for the microfilm is: *ZC-591.
8 boxes
This series is made up of three sub-series: Appointment Books and Notebooks, Biographical Materials, and Personal Files. It contains medical papers relating to Lillian Gish and other personal items including a lock of her hair and her measurements, appointment and date books, genealogy files on the Gish family, address books and Christmas card lists, household papers and documents regarding Mary Robinson Gish and the estate of Dorothy Gish. Other personal items include invitations, valentines and cards as well as inspirational writings and photographs.
4 boxes
This series consists of 4 sub-series and documents most of Lillian Gish's financial and legal matters. Of special note in this series are the papers relating to the Duell lawsuit and her property and real estate materials. Papers document her career, such as contracts may also be contained in Series 4 - Professional Work Files.
7 boxes
This series consists of two sub-series and documents the career of Lillian Gish. Included in these files are correspondence, ephemera and legal materials about films, plays, television, lectures and personal appearances. There is some crossover in the legal and financial materials related to career and these may also be found in the Series III - Legal and Financial Papers.
10 boxes
This series consists of six sub-series and documents the writings of Lillian Gish as well as others. Of special note in this series is the manuscript entitled Silver Glory which was the basis for The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, the television program Infinity in an Hour and the lecture series Lillian Gish and the Movies. Also included are speeches, lectures and articles written by Lillian Gish.
5 boxes
This series consists of three sub-series and contains information which Lillian Gish collected throughout her life. Of special note is the sub-series containing information about D.W. Griffith.
1 box
Included in this series are clean scripts of plays, television programs and motion pictures which were sent to Lillian Gish for her review. None of these scripts are for productions in which Miss Gish appeared.
4 boxes
This series consists of 2 sub-series and contains tributes and awards given to Lillian Gish. Included as well are many presentation items of a personal nature sent by fans and close friends.
1 box
Includes telegrams (1938), Lucy Kroll correspondence and contracts (1959-1962) [and 3 letters from Lillian, who was on location for The Unforgiven, to the Krolls], fan mail (1922-1924), Dorothy's 1925 passport, snapshots, clippings, programs, insurance papers (1922-1966) and 2 scrapbooks of halftones.
24 boxes
Includes personal photographs of Lillian and Dorothy Gish with friends and family members, photographs and portraits of the Gish family and relatives, production photographs from many films, plays and television programs in which the Gish sisters appeared, professional protraits by many well-known photographers of the era, autographed photographs of friends and professional colleagues, and 2 photograph scrapbooks from the early careers of Lillian and Dorothy Gish.
6 boxes
Clippings document the career of Lillian Gish from early silent film through her life and career in stage, screen and television. Included in this series are not only U.S. clippings but foreign newspaper clippings as well.
8 oversized boxes
The oversized photographs consist of portraits and photographs of Lillian and Dorothy Gish, portraits of family members and pictures of friends. Included as well, are photographs by Laura Gilpin and many oversized portraits by Nell Dorr. There are also production photographs from films and plays the Gish sisters were in.
2 boxes
This series consists of 4 sub-series and was created primarily as a means to provide easy storage and shelving. The sub-series mirror other portions of the collection and are arranged to reflect from where in the collection the materials were removed.
33 vols
The scrapbooks consist of 33 volumes of clippings, programs, photographs and some correspondence documenting the careers of Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Included are scrapbooks documenting the productions Nell Gwyn, Young Love, The Star-Wagon and Life With Father. One scrapbook is a tour scrapbook written through the eyes of Lillian Gish's dog, Malcolm. Of special note is a Lillian Gish scrapbook containing many unique programs from late in her career. | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 82 | https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/collection/search | en | National Museum of African American History and Culture | https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAAHC-A8B0BF382BCE2_5001&max=500 | https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=NMAAHC-A8B0BF382BCE2_5001&max=500 | [
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5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 74 | https://time.com/6973358/the-idea-of-you-robinne-lee-fanfiction/ | en | The Idea of You Author Robinne Lee on Fanfic and Women's Art | [
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"Robinne Lee"
] | 2024-05-02T12:00:00+00:00 | When Robinne Lee wrote The Idea of You, she didn't expect her story about ageism, sexism, and agency to be reduced to "fluff." | en | /favicon.ico | TIME | https://time.com/6973358/the-idea-of-you-robinne-lee-fanfiction/ | In the spring of 2014, when I set out to write the novel that would become The Idea Of You, I didn’t plan on writing something that was revolutionary or controversial. I wanted to write a story about Solène Marchand, a woman on the cusp of 40 who rediscovers and redefines herself through an unexpected love with a much younger man who happens to be a world-famous celebrity. As someone who was in that age range and who should have just been hitting my stride in my professional life as an actor, I was seeing the sudden shift in parts available to me. The characters had become more staid, the opportunities fewer and further between. I was learning the hard way that in Hollywood, after 40, women are much less desirable. The assumption was that we ceased to be sexual beings and were thus less valuable. I was eager to prove the industry—and our culture at large—wrong, in my own little way.
Shortly after the book’s publication in 2017, I realized I was also bumping up against something else. Some readers were viewing this story about ageism, sexism, the double standard, motherhood, female friendship, agency, and the dark side of celebrity as nothing more than “fluff.” They focused on the love story and the sex to the exclusion of the other pertinent themes of the book. They called it a romance. It was not. Romance novels have specific rules, and my book did not follow them. But it was labeled and categorized as such.
Was it because it centered on a woman’s love story? Because the main characters, Solène and Hayes Campbell, two consenting adults, had a healthy sexual appetite? Or maybe it was the cover and the publisher’s marketing campaign? I’ll never know. But I started receiving messages from women that began with self-conscious and belittling openings like, “This is not the type of book I typically read, however…” and “I didn’t think I was going to like this book, but…” Then they’d proceed to discuss all the themes I’d set out to grapple with in writing the novel. It was clear they had made assumptions. They didn’t think a story about a woman’s midlife sexual awakening might contain something deeper. They couldn’t imagine it might be both tantalizing and complex.
I am a lover of literary fiction. I appreciate stories with characters who are not necessarily like me, who expose me to new worlds and new ways of thinking through elegant prose. I crave stories that are multilayered and have something profound to say. But I also enjoy stories that entertain, that provide levity and occasional escapism. And I have always tried to write in a space encompassing both.
Read More: The Most Anticipated Movies of 2024
There’s a scene in The Idea Of You when Hayes, a member of the chart-topping British boy band August Moon, is disparaging his work as the group’s founder, and Solène, a sophisticated art dealer, is imploring him to not discredit what he and his bandmates do.
“It’s art. And it makes people happy,” she says. “And that’s a very good thing. We have this problem in our culture. We take art that appeals to women—film, books, music—and we undervalue it. We assume it can’t be high art. Especially if it’s not dark and tortured and wailing. And it follows that much of that art is created by other women, and so we undervalue them as well. We wrap it up in a pretty pink package and resist calling it art.”
That sentiment has resonated with me more in the years since I wrote this line of dialogue than ever before. I thought about it when Barbie became the biggest box-office hit of 2023 and the highest-grossing film ever directed by a woman, yet Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were not nominated for Best Director or Best Actress, respectively, at the Oscars. I thought about it when I revisited critics’ resistance to Taylor Swift and the dismissal of her fandom for the first decade of her career, writing both off as juvenile and unserious. We all know who got the last laugh there. In April, Swift was named to the Forbes billionaire list, becoming the first musician whose earnings stem solely from her songs and performances to do so. Not so unserious now, is she?
In no other case does Solène’s description of that sentiment feel more personal than with the responses to her story. Labeling it as “fluff” or “fanfiction”—particularly when done by those who have not read it—is both reductive and dismissive. And this is not something that happens to male authors. It’s bad enough that so many novels with female protagonists are labeled women’s fiction, while those with male protagonists are simply fiction, and that these categorizations exist regardless of the fact that fiction readers across the board are disproportionately women. But assuming a novel with a fictional celebrity in a relationship must be based on an existing celebrity—in this case, the internet has decided, Harry Styles—is unimaginative at best and sexist at worst.
There are some brilliant, beloved writers of fanfic out there, but fanfiction is just not what I do. Hayes Campbell, like Solène Marchand and the myriad other characters in this book, was inspired in part by people I’ve encountered and by art I’ve consumed, and he came to life thanks to a healthy dose of my imagination. It’s how most writers I know, regardless of gender, create their characters and their worlds.
Read More: The Idea of You Is About the Ultimate Middle-Aged-Lady Fantasy—Being Noticed
My case is just one symptom of the larger disease in the broader literary world, where comparable works by women and men are given inequitable weight. “First-person narrative by men is still published and reviewed as more serious and gets a lot more money and coverage,” author and academic Kate Zambreno said in a recent New York Times interview. “It’s also usually not dismissed as merely autofiction or memoir, instead read as literature encompassing psychogeography, philosophy, art criticism. Even if a woman is doing exactly that, she’s usually still marketed as merely writing a woman’s experience or, worse, a mom memoir, if she has children.”
What is it about art made by women and marketed toward women that makes us view it as less than—that makes us think they can’t be complex and important? We don’t wrap male writers’ books in pink and tell readers they’re great for the beach. We don’t frown upon consumers of male fiction as juvenile. We don’t reduce their writing to fanfiction and attach a celebrity’s name for clickbait. Bottom line: we don’t undervalue them and their work.
I never set out to write a novel that would spark this kind of debate. Hayes and Solène’s story has made readers think about their agency and ambition, about love and aging and the meaning of human connection—and it’s made them laugh, cry, wallow, and sigh in the process. Perhaps it is art, after all. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 23 | 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) | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 80 | https://www.ryananswers.com/blog/what-attracts-women-to-men-psychology/ | en | Ryan Answers Relationship Counselling Hamilton | [
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] | 2020-03-31T23:40:14+00:00 | Attraction is a complicated concept. Often times men get caught up in trying to impress women in various ways. Ryan breaks down the psychology of attraction and you may be surprised on what really counts! | en | Hamilton Counselling and Couples Therapy - Ryan Answers | https://www.ryananswers.com/blog/what-attracts-women-to-men-psychology/ | It’s a question often asked: What attracts women to men? Are some guys just born naturally attractive to women, or is it how a man lives his life that makes him attractive?
Today I’m going to bust THE big myth about what attracts women to men, and give you the straight up honest truth.
You’ll learn the underlying psychology of why women are attracted to certain things men do, and I’ll be showing you how you can use this knowledge to understand why there are so many popular misconceptions about attraction.
Why Is Attraction Such a Complex Issue These Days?
The problem is this:
1) Attraction is a genetic thing – women are programmed to respond to certain qualities like height, dominance, confidence, and so on
Historically (we’re talking hundreds of thousands of years) the men who possessed these qualities produced offspring with a higher chance of survival than men who didn’t, and as a result these men were responsible for a greater percentage of surviving children. The increased success rate was probably something marginal, but over hundreds of thousands of years, even a marginal advantage becomes extremely noticeable and widespread throughout a species.
2) This genetic programming is based on what works in an environment that is VERY different from the environment we live in now
We no longer have to run from predators, hunt and forage for food, and engage in conflict with neighbouring tribes. Things that were typically a disadvantage aren’t such a big deal anymore – people who would’ve been left for dead can now be productive, successful members of society who can provide for a family.
Although you don’t really need to be your classic alpha male type to survive and do well these days, the ancient attraction programming remains intact and pushes women towards guys who behave this way. Don’t go try to be an alpha male though – what you think it means and what it actually is are likely two very different things.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but being attractive is something you can learn to do by paying attention to your beliefs, behaviours, body language, and putting at least a bit of effort into being decent looking.
The modern attractive man isn’t some super aggressive juice head whose life motto is “never back down”. He’s just a normal guy who’s comfortable with who he is: confident, well put together, and willing to put the work in to actually go out and meet people.
The Big Attraction Myth: You Need Things Like Height, Money, and Social Status to Be Attractive to Women
I know I just said women are genetically predisposed to want these things, and it might seem like I’m contradicting myself here. Especially since in our own personal experience we often see the most attractive women with tall, rich, successful men. Actors, business owners, executives, guys with nice houses and fast cars.
The reason why it SEEMS like height, looks, social status, and money attract women is a common cognitive error: a misunderstanding of correlation and causality. Causality means one thing causes another, like being rich causing women to like you. Correlation means one thing is linked to another thing, like rich men being more likely to have attractive women with them, but not necessarily because of their wealth.
Now, there are of course some women who will only date men above a certain height, income level, and so on, but the majority of women aren’t like this.
So why would we believe things like money, social status, and so on are correlates rather than causes?
The reason is rooted in the way women identify these traits in men. If women are attracted to men with status and wealth, an effective evolutionary strategy for men would be to fake these traits. Producing offspring with a faker could be disastrous for the woman; a faker likely does not have adequate resources and social influence to provide for her offspring.
To counter this, women must be able to differentiate between the men who genuinely have wealth and social status, and those who are faking. One way to do this is by developing a heightened sense of social perception and recognizing what successful man behaviour looks like compared to the behaviour of an imitator. The behaviours become the primary source of attraction.
Women are not attracted directly to wealth and status, but to the behaviours indicating a man genuinely has wealth and status.
This provides the explanation for why it seems like wealth, status, and height matter so much. If you were suddenly made better looking, a few inches taller, and inherited a billion dollars, would you behave the same way you do now? Of course not! You’d instantly be more confident, more relaxed, happier, less stressed out, and so on.
Women pick up on these behaviours, and it’s these behaviour patterns that are at the core of attraction, not the wealth and status itself.
Can a Lot of Confidence Overcome Deficiencies in Height/Wealth/Looks/etc.?
It can definitely increase your chances, but you still need to do what you can to make yourself more attractive. Eating right and getting in shape will not only help you look better, it will make you a hundred times more confident. Just because women will still date you if you drive a beater, doesn’t mean they don’t prefer a BMW.
In short, confidence helps, but no woman is going to stick around for very long if you have no ambition, passion, or direction in life. You might get laid, but why would a smart, attractive, fun woman stay with a confident but lazy man when there’s tons of confident ambitious guys out there?
There’s just no excuse to not have your shit together. It’s not so much about being super rich and having washboard abs as it is not having any glaring deficiencies. As long as you’re reasonably in shape, well groomed, drive something not about to break down, and have a clean place of your own, you’re doing fine.
Why is Confidence Such a Big Part of Being an Attractive Man?
Essentially, confidence is about being yourself. It’s about being congruent and able to authentically express who you are without worrying about what people think. People who lack confidence, who are socially awkward, who are afraid to speak their mind, what they’re doing is broadcasting to the world that they’re willing to stifle their own impulses and desires for the sake of social acceptance.
This indicates they’re not used to being socially dominant and enforcing their worldview, that they may have been subject to social rejection in the past, or maybe they’re not typically successful and their fear of failure causes doubt and hesitation.
Men who are naturally attractive to women aren’t all super smooth James Bond types, in fact I don’t know many people like that at all. The guys I do know who are quiet and serious but still get laid are very good looking, and they succeed in spite of their personality, not because of it.
Most guys who are really good with women are the guys who are fun to be around. They’re not afraid to show their goofy, quirky side. They’re adventurous and outgoing. For a real life example of a guy who isn’t good looking but has an attractive personality, look at someone like Seth Rogan. He’s the type of guy women say they have a “weird crush” on, the type who isn’t good looking, but is still attractive.
5 Tips for Being More Physically Attractive to Women
Remember, you don’t need to be some fit, super suave looking playboy (trying too hard usually backfires), you just need to look like you put at least a bit of effort in.
1) Develop a style that reflects who you are
Don’t just wear random clothes, think about what sort of image you want to project. When women look at you, what do they see? Try to imagine yourself from your ideal woman’s perspective: if you were your ideal woman, would you date you? Does your style reflect the unique person you are, or are you just another average guy?
2) Go to the gym at least once per week
Even if you’re in decent shape, go to the gym! You’ll look better, but more importantly you’ll feel better. If you aren’t in shape, this is even more important.
3) Get a good haircut
Find a proper salon in your area. You might not notice the difference between a cheap and an expensive haircut, but I guarantee you women do. A well trained stylist who’s good at his/her job will know what kind of haircut suits your face, and they’ll do a much better job. You can get great haircuts in most major cities for around $45.
4) Work on your body language
It’s so important but so hard to notice yourself. I recommend filming yourself talking to see how much you fidget, what your expression and eye contact is like, if you sway back and forth, and so on. Read up on body language and try to become more aware of how you move. It’ll be awkward at first, but you’ll adjust.
5) Make sure you’re groomed
No nose/ear hair, keep your beard trimmed. Nothing wrong with a beard, but don’t just let it grow wildly. If you have bad skin, see a doctor or try a few different skin care products. Get rid of the unibrow, even if it’s just a few stubbly hairs between your eyes. Coordinate your facial hair with your haircut.
5 Tips for Developing an Attractive Personality
This is a much tougher process than being physically attractive. Reason being: the key to being emotionally attractive is being yourself, but hardly anyone understands how exactly to do this. It doesn’t help that so many sources tell you NOT to be yourself, and give you advice about acting smooth that just makes you look like a dickwad.
1) Define yourself
An interesting fact: demographics (location, income level, etc.) are the best predictor of what a person will believe. When you ask most people what they believe, what they value, what they want out of life and why, they can’t tell you. Knowing what you want and having a direction in life that’s congruent with who you are is wildly attractive. Women love a man who knows what he wants and goes after it.
2) Be comfortable alone
Neediness is one of the worst, most unattractive qualities a guy can have. Make sure you spend time being alone and not passively consuming media. Sitting around watching TV or creeping facebook isn’t what I mean. I’m talking about reading, thinking, meditating, being in touch with who you are. We’re exposed to so much social pressure and influence that it takes a conscious effort to shed all off and discover who we are and what we want.
3) Eliminate negative or limiting beliefs
Do you believe you’re incapable, unworthy, not cool? Do you feel, deep down, like you deserve the lifestyle you want? The woman you want? Or do you secretly feel like the women you want are out of your league? Like the job, house, car, type of life you want are out of reach? Trace these beliefs to their roots. Why do you believe those things? Are they valid reasons? Could you be giving certain people or events too much weight when it comes to determining your value as a person? Ultimately, it’s about living up to your own expectations, not anyone else’s.
4) Practice self-awareness and authentic expression
Become aware of how you behave, what you say and do. Are these things in line with your beliefs and desired life direction? Imagine who you’d like to be, and make a conscious effort to be that person on a daily basis. Speak your mind and act on your desires – don’t be ashamed or embarrassed about what you believe or what you want. Attractive men are willing to risk rejection or criticism to get the things they want in life.
5) Practice lifestyle design
If there are particular things about your life you want to improve, like making more money, being more fit, meeting new people, learning a new skill, and so on, write those things down and make a plan for reaching them. Having goals you’re working towards brings about a lot of different benefits: confidence when you reach them, a sense of purpose while you’re working on them, and a sense of achievement and self-worth that comes with having a plan for your life. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 35 | https://www.vulture.com/article/50-best-western-movies-ever.html | en | The 50 Greatest Western Movies Ever Made | [
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] | 2021-01-18T10:00:28.392000-05:00 | The history of movie Westerns more or less begins with the end of the Old West itself. We run down the 50 best examples of the genre. | en | Vulture | https://www.vulture.com/article/50-best-western-movies-ever.html | This article was originally published September 4, 2019 and has been updated to include additional movies.
America can only claim a few art forms as its own. Jazz, for sure. Comic books, certainly. It’s probably safe to add the Western to that list, too, even if — like jazz and comics — the Western has roots around the globe and has since been adopted in many lands.
The history of movie Westerns more or less begins with the end of the Old West itself. Westerns thrived in the silent era, and though the genre’s popularity has ebbed and flowed ever since — largely fading from view in the ’80s but enjoy several resurgences in succeeding decades — it’s never threatened to fade away. The Western is a vital genre with the habit of reinventing itself every few years that doubles as a way to talk about America’s history while reflecting on its present. A strand of violent, psychologically complex Westerns that appeared in the 1950s, for example, captures both changing attitudes toward the settlement of the West and the treatment of Native Americans while channeling the spirit of a country still recovering from a devastating World War. And while there are certain themes and elements that define the genre, it’s also proven to be flexible, capable of playing host to many different stories and an infinite variety of characters. In Paul Greengrass’s film News of the World, for instance, Tom Hanks plays a traveling newsreader whose attempt to return a girl to her family doubles as a tour of a country whose divisions look like clear roots to some of our current national troubles.
This list of the 50 greatest Westerns reflects that wide legacy from the very first entry, a film directed by a Hungarian and starring a Tasmanian. It’s been assembled, however, working from a fairly traditional definition of the Western: films set along the America frontier of the 19th and the first years of the 20th century. That means no modern Westerns, no stealth Westerns starring aged X-Men, and no space Westerns with blasters instead of pistols. (We did, however, make an exception for a certain comedy that concludes with its stars attending its own premiere.)
That, of course, still leaves a lot of great Westerns. More, of course, than could possibly fit on a top-50 list interested in capturing the full scope of the genre. As such, not every John Ford film made the list. Anthony Mann and James Stewart made eight Westerns together. Any of them could have been included, but not all of them have been. This list is designed to double as a guide to the genre’s many different forms in the hopes it will send readers to corners they might not know and reconsider some classics they might not have seen before.
So with all that said, let’s kick it off with a trip to an especially rowdy Old Western town.
50.
Dodge City (1939)
Some of the greatest Westerns ever made tweak the genre’s traditions and expectations — traditions and expectations created by countless films that like their good guys to wear white hats, their bad guys to be instantly identifiable villains, their saloons to play host to barroom brawls, and their climactic shoot-outs to be rousing. Dodge City has no interest in subverting any of that. Directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland — a team that had recently enjoyed great success with films like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood — the film wants nothing more than to be a traditional Western on the grandest scale imaginable. Flynn plays a man compelled to clean up the lawless cattle town of Dodge City. De Havilland plays the woman who loves him (eventually), and Bruce Cabot plays a lawless tough guy. The rest, as the saying goes, writes itself, but the film’s so entertaining that the familiarity of it all doesn’t matter. Flynn and de Havilland transport the chemistry of their swashbuckling adventures to the Old West, while Curtiz makes brilliant use of Technicolor and a big budget. Anyone new to the Western or just wanting to see a Hollywood Western in its most basic form executed at the highest possible level should start here. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
49.
The Sisters Brothers (2018)
At the other end of the spectrum lies what back in the ’60s used to be called “the revisionist Western,” though its influence has so permeated the genre that it’s hard to tell where traditionalism ends and revisionism begins. Put simply, the revisionist Western steers away from, or plays against, formula, refusing to romanticize the Old West or depict it as a place with clear good guys and bad guys. It also tends to emphasize the grimier, more unpleasant aspects of life in the American West. One litmus test: If you see flies buzzing around a corpse, you’re probably watching a revisionist Western.
There’s grime aplenty, but also unexpected sweetness, in The Sisters Brothers, in which John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play brothers who work as hired assassins, despite being temperamentally unsuited for the job. Hired by a rich man to take out an inventor named Warm (Riz Ahmed), they run into mission drift as they get to know both their target and the other man tracking him down, a private detective named Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal). Adapted by Jacques Audiard from a novel by Patrick deWitt, the film didn’t find much of an audience when it played in theaters. But it’s a cult classic waiting to happen, a cockeyed look at a time and place in America when the rules hadn’t yet hardened and seemingly anything could happen — for good and for ill. It also features a breathtaking ending that’s unlike anything another Western has dared. (Available to stream on Pluto TV, Tubi, and Plex.)
48.
Buck and the Preacher (1972)
Watch enough classic Westerns and it’s easy to conclude — leaving out a few exceptions — that African-Americans rarely had a role to play in the Old West, or at best kept to the margins of the stories that defined it. That doesn’t square with history, and Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut shines a light on just one underrepresented Old West story via the tale of some Black migrants fleeing the brutality of Reconstruction life to find a new life in unsettled territory — only to find that prejudice and other perils await them on their journey. Poitier stars as Buck, a former soldier who escorts wagon trains for pay but comes to find he has a deeper stake in the well being of those he protects. A virtually unrecognizable Harry Belafonte co-stars as Preacher, a scraggly, traveling man of God/con man who, eventually, throws in with Buck. Joined by Ruby Dee, they make a fun buddy team. Their chemistry provides a light counterbalance to the film’s exploration of the complicated racial dynamics that defined the West, including the party’s tense arrangement with the Native Americans who never let the migrants forget they’re only visitors as they pass through their territory. (Available to stream on Prime Video and Tubi.)
47.
Day of Anger (1967)
The Western genre got a shot of new ideas starting in the early ’60s thanks to the proliferation of European Westerns, many of them made by Italian directors using stretches of Italy and Spain that mostly looked like the Old West — not to mention a mix of American and European stars. The master of what would come to be known as Spaghetti Westerns was Sergio Leone, whose breakthrough film, 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars, made a movie star out of a TV actor named Clint Eastwood and helped spark a boom that would lead to hundreds of such films in the decades that follow. (More on Leone, Eastwood, and A Fistful of Dollars below.) With their askew takes on the American mythos, twisted characters, inventive scores, vivid imagery, and florid violence, the Spaghetti Western developed into a rich subgenre that could easily fill a top 50 list of its own, one that rewards those who venture away from Leone. One example: Day of Anger, directed by Leone’s former assistant director Tonino Valerii. Giuliano Gemma stars as Scott, a lowly street sweeper whose status starts to change when Frank Talby (Lee Van Cleef, an American actor whose career got a second act thanks to Spaghetti Westerns) takes him under his wing. But he soon learns that there’s a price to be paid by those who would use a gun to move up in the world. Clearly inspired by Leone — they’d work together again on the fun My Name Is Nobody in 1973 — Valerii mixes cutting black humor with scenes of violence, blending enthrall with revulsion as we see what it means to make one’s reputation by shedding blood. (Available to stream on Plex and Tubi).
46.
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Consider this: When Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery, using New Jersey as a stand-in for the American frontier, the Old West wasn’t even that old. Most historians use 1912, when Arizona and New Mexico became states, as the closing of the frontier. But, as with the dime novels that made heroes and legends out of its inhabitants, the West was already passing into myth when Porter made this violent, crisply edited film in which bandits meet a bad end after robbing a telegraph office (but not before thrilling audiences with their daring and ruthlessness, like so many heroes and villains to follow them). The final shot, in which the lead bandit takes aim at the audience, is its own kind of wonder, implicating viewers in both the threat and the thrill of what they’d just seen. (Available to stream on YouTube.)
45.
Broken Arrow (1950)
If the Western genre has an original sin, it’s the portrayal of Native Americans, treated by many films alternately as buffoons and subhuman savages. The demeaning depictions have ties to some of the ugliest chapters in American history. And just as the country at large is still reckoning with the consequences of its conquest of the West, the Western genre will always have to grapple with its most thoughtless and hateful portrayals. Some films tried to offer correctives, though they usually weren’t without their own sorts of awkwardness. Directed by Delmer Daves, Broken Arrow loses points for casting white actors in most of its Native American roles, a once-common practice that now seems baffling. But it scores points for weaving a message of tolerance into an effective, fact-inspired adventure story in which James Stewart plays Tom Jeffords, an ex-Army scout who befriends the Apache chief Cochise (Jeff Chandler) and works to defuse tensions in the area. The film both helped nudge the Western’s depiction of Native Americans in a more sympathetic direction (though not every film responded to that nudge) and — with Winchester ’73, released the same year — helped confirm Stewart as one of the key stars of the new decade, thus bringing about a more complex, conflicted sort of Western hero. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
44.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Marlon Brando only directed one movie and it didn’t exactly do his career any favors. He went over schedule, and over budget with One-Eyed Jacks, which premiered to mixed reviews and commercial indifference. The release of a restored print in 2016 — shepherded by admirers like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg — helped confirm what the film’s partisans had argued all along: Brando knew what he was doing behind the camera. Scorsese described it as “represent[ing] a sort of bridge between two eras in moviemaking: the production values of old Hollywood and the emotional values of the new Hollywood,” an apt summation of a classic-looking Western anchored by Brando’s tortured performance as Rio, an outlaw determined to exact revenge on an older partner he calls Dad (Karl Malden) who’s gone straight and become a lawman — a plan made all the more complicated when Rio falls for Dad’s stepdaughter (Pina Pellicer). The production was dogged by stories of Brando wasting time waiting for just the right waves to appear for a shot, but the film itself bears out his instincts. Sometimes you just have to wait for the right wave to suggest the roiling emotions of a bad guy trying to decide if he wants to follow his instincts to their violent ends. (Available to stream on Pluto TV, Tubi, and Plex.)
43.
Little Big Man (1970)
Few revisionist Westerns took the task of demythologizing the West as literally as Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, which is narrated by the 121-year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman, under extremely impressive aging makeup) who tries to set the record straight by telling a historian what really happened in the Old West. Crabb has an unusual perspective. A white kid raised by the Cheyenne, he bounces back and forth between the white and Native American worlds over the course of the film, finding abundance of absurdity on both sides but an overabundance of hypocrisy and cruelty on only one. Penn balances comedy against tragedy, depicting Crabb bungling his way through stints as a gunslinger and a soldier then refusing to look away from the massacres he witnesses, scenes Penn fills with echoes of the Vietnam War. Even those who remember the past sometimes live long enough to see it repeated. (Available to stream on Prime Video.)
42.
The Left Handed Gun (1958)
Speaking of Penn, years before he made Bonnie and Clyde sympathetic outlaws, he did much the same for Billy the Kid with The Left Handed Gun. As played by Paul Newman, William Bonney is a trigger-happy hothead who’s more misunderstood than evil. Taken in by a cattle boss, he becomes enraged when a competing bunch of cattlemen kill his mentor. The anger ultimately leads to his downfall, but not before he starts to see his own short life start to become legend. Working from a take on Bonney originated by Gore Vidal, Penn and Newman treat him as a rebel with an overdeveloped sense of justice and underdeveloped impulse control. It serves as a showcase for a complex, twitchy performance for Newman, who was just coming into his own as a major movie star, and for Penn, whose directorial debut captures a director ready to question received American myths from the start. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
41.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
A similar impulse drives Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but rather than fill the film with restless energy, as Penn did, Dominik opts for a more meditative approach. Brad Pitt plays James opposite Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, an admirer and gang recruit who ultimately turns against his idol. Aided by stunning Roger Deakins cinematography and an entrancing score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Dominik’s film locks into the rhythms of another time, letting sharp moments of violence interrupt long, slow passages that wouldn’t be out of place in a film by Terrence Malick (one of Dominick’s obvious reference points). The film had a difficult journey to theaters where it drew only small but devoted audiences, yet even then it seemed destined to be regarded as a classic unappreciated in its time. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
40.
The Shootist (1976)
John Wayne might not have known the end was near when he agreed to make The Shootist for Don Siegel, but he must have had his suspicions. Wayne, who died in 1979, had fought cancer since the early ’60s and had been finding it increasingly hard to work due to his physical limitations. The story of a gunfighter facing down death, The Shootist didn’t begin as an elegiac tribute to the star — a number of other, younger actors passed on the part — but it works beautifully as Wayne’s swan song, giving him a character who’s lived long enough to become a Western legend only to learn that that status has more detriments than benefits. Filled with familiar faces — James Stewart and John Carradine among them — and set in 1901, it also captures the passing of one era and the coming of another. Wayne’s character, J.B. Books, becomes the idol of a teenage boy named Gillom (Ron Howard), but the film’s ultimately about how the sort of life Books lived has no place in the world that’s coming. Nor did Wayne, but Siegel’s film gives him a fitting good-bye. (Available to stream on Showtime.)
39.
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Filled with deep knowledge of and affection for the classic Western, and a willingness to blow raspberries at it anyway, Blazing Saddles finds Mel Brooks (and a writing team that included Richard Pryor and Andrew Bergman) deploying every sort of gag known to comedy, from dark, anachronistic asides (“I must’ve killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille”) to a concerto of bean-assisted farts. But it might just have been a fun romp were it not for the social commentary central to the story of Bart (Cleavon Little), a black man sent by the corrupt Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) to stir up trouble in the town of Rock Ridge so it can be demolished to make way for a railroad line. It’s silliness with a purpose, and the film weaves the jokes and the pointed jabs together brilliantly. Brooks directs with an understanding of how classic Westerns work, but the film is driven by a need to tell the sort of story they never could. (Available to stream on Paramount+.)
38.
The Tall T (1957)
Between 1956 and 1960 director Budd Boetticher, writers Burt Kennedy and Charles Lang, and star Randolph Scott teamed up for six films that came to be known as the Ranown Cycle — tough, tight, morally complex stories of the Old West and the difficulties of being a person of conscience while living within it. All beautifully crafted and carefully considered, any of them would make a fine addition to this list (and there’s one more a little further up the line). Adapted from a story by Elmore Leonard, The Tall T casts Scott as a down-on-his-luck cowboy who ends up in the middle of a scheme to ransom a wealthy woman (Maureen O’Hara) newly wed to a coward. Boetticher keeps the suspense high in a film deeply interested in what it means to be an honorable man under impossible circumstances, a struggle Scott depicts less through words than actions and the emotions he feels but never expresses. (Available to stream on Plex, Starz, and Tubi.)
37.
Django (1966)
Undoubtedly the most influential Spaghetti Western not directed by Sergio Leone, Django takes the ugliness and violence of Leone’s films up several notches for a story that pits an ex-Union soldier named Django (Franco Nero) against the Klan and other foes. Sergio Corbucci — who also contributed memorable entries like Navajo Joe and The Great Silence to the Spaghetti canon — directs like Leone without the lyricism, putting the emphasis squarely on violence and absurdity. But his approach, and Nero’s performance, serve the lean, mean, bloody story well. The film has one official sequel but dozens of unofficial follow-ups with titles like Django, Prepare a Coffin and A Few Dollars for Django. It also has even more imitators who found varying degrees of success by combining a mysterious hero with ever-escalating violence. The original, however, remains a dark delight. (Available to stream on Peacock and Pluto TV. )
36.
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
The ’50s and ’60s found international filmmakers engaging in a fascinating cultural exchange. For his 1954 classic Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa looked to the American Western — especially the films of John Ford — for inspiration. The American Western repaid the tribute with this remake of Seven Samurai directed by John Sturges. Sturges’s film lacks some of the surprise and depth of Kurosawa’s film, but it’s as entertaining as big Hollywood Westerns get, putting Yul Brynner in charge of a mismatched band of gunfighters (whose ranks include Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn) as they defend a Mexican village plagued by bandits under the command of a sadistic leader played by Eli Wallach. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
35.
Bend of the River (1952)
The West held the promise of reinvention, serving as a place where those who wanted to start a new chapter in their lives could forget the past. But does a fresh start always change the contents of a person’s heart? That’s the question at the center of this Anthony Mann Western in which James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy both play former border raiders who, in the years after the Civil War, have started to create new lives for themselves on the frontier. For Stewart’s character, that means helping a wagon train find its way to Oregon. For Kennedy’s that maybe means the same thing. But maybe not. Mann’s film explores what it takes to redeem the bad actions of the past while depicting the corrupting influence of wealth, watching as the discovery of gold turns almost everyone into monsters and the Edenic Oregon Territory into a land ruled by greed. It’s a complex, gripping drama that’s unafraid to send some likable characters down dark paths, and it all plays out against stunning Pacific Northwest scenery (some less-convincing-than-usual soundstage sequences aside). (Not currently available on streaming.)
34.
A Bullet for the General (1966)
The Spaghetti Western’s offshoots include the Zapata Western, which set stories against the background of the Mexican Revolution. This often provided filmmakers the chance to offer coded (and sometimes not so coded) commentary on the politics of the 1960s. Among the first of its type, Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General mixes rousing action with a story of betrayal and political assassination that ends with an unambiguous call for the underclass to take up arms. Unsurprisingly, its screenwriting team includes Franco Solinas, the Marxist co-writer of The Battle of Algiers, but Damiani effectively folds the film’s political agenda into an exciting narrative filled with memorable action scenes that exemplifies how popular entertainment can often be the best way to deliver a message. (Available to stream on Plex and Tubi.)
33.
Vera Cruz (1954)
Spaghetti Westerns didn’t come out of nowhere. Their precursors include this Robert Aldrich film, in which a financially struggling plantation owner named Ben (Gary Cooper) seeks to bail himself out any way he can by seeking his fortune in Mexico. There he teams up with Joe (Burt Lancaster), the morally suspect leader of a band of outlaws (a band that includes Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson and others), to make off with a fortune in gold coins. Aldrich brings a surplus of visual flair to a sweat-soaked film in which Cooper’s character looks like a good guy only in contrast to the even worse guys around him. Cooper’s tight-lipped performance leaves Lancaster plenty of room to play the colorful rogue, a man who can keep up a charm offensive up to the moment he puts a bullet in your back. (Available to stream on MGM+, Pluto TV, and Tubi.)
32.
Ride the High Country (1962)
Budd Boetticher moved on from movie Westerns after Comanche Station in 1960, focusing instead on TV work and a documentary about matador Carlos Arruza. Randolph Scott, on the other hand, made one more Western, the 1962 film Ride the High Country. The first Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah, it plays a bit like the passing of the torch. Scott and Joel McCrea co-star as aging cowboys who take on the job of guarding a gold shipment. They’re men past their prime in a world that’s passing them by, and they know it, but they’re determined to make the most of their last ride. Peckinpah would soon make movies that would upend the Western genre with their balletic violence and dirt-caked vision of the West. Ride the High Country finds him exploring some of his pet themes — particularly the end of the West and what it means to be a man out of time — via a much more traditional style and using major stars of a not-quite-but-almost-bygone era. A lovely, quietly mournful film, it, too, would be one of the last of its kind. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
31.
The Shooting (1966)
Some films never fully give up their mysteries. The Shooting, one of two low-budget Westerns that Monte Hellman made back-to-back in Utah for an uncredited Roger Corman, is one such film. Working from a script by future Five Easy Pieces writer Carole Eastman (working under a pseudonym), Hellman turns the story of two gunslingers (Warren Oates and Will Hutchins) accompanying an unnamed woman (Millie Perkins) through an unforgiving desert while being trailed by a man in black (a menacing Jack Nicholson). Artful and at times almost abstract, it strips the Western down to its fundamental elements and then strips away some more as it builds to an ending as mysterious in its own way as the end of Don’t Look Now (or Hellman’s own Two-Lane Blacktop). For a long time, The Shooting seemed almost more like a rumor than a film. It never played theaters and aired just a few times on TV. But those who saw it kept its flame alive, and it’s rightfully received a second life thanks to home video. The film’s more conventional companion piece, Ride in the Whirlwind, also starring Nicholson and Perkins, is also very much worth a look. (Available to stream on Peacock, Prime Video, Max and Tubi.)
30.
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Clint Eastwood’s fifth film as a director has tangled origins. It began as a film by Philip Kaufman, who took on the job of adapting a book by a man who called himself Forrest Carter, who’d later write the memoir The Education of Little Tree recounting his upbringing in the Cherokee tradition. Kaufman lost his job while shooting the film and Carter would later be exposed as a fraud — a former member of the Klan and a speechwriter for George Wallace. Despite how it got started, The Outlaw Josey Wales ended up as very much a Clint Eastwood film, and a more mature consideration of the genre than he’d managed with its dark, violent, and deeply satisfying predecessor High Plains Drifter. Trading in a story of revenge for one of reconciliation, Eastwood stars as Josey Wales, a member of a pro-Confederate militia who heads West to escape a bounty on his head. Having lost his wife and child to pro-Union forces, he expects his journey to be a lonely one, only to pick up a kind of surrogate family that includes an aged Cherokee man (Chief Dan George), a mute Navajo woman, and others. Eastwood doesn’t skimp on the violence, but the film ultimately cares more about what happens after violence ends, and how a country patches itself together after a divisive war, a theme that resonated with mid-’70s America. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
29.
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
A tight, chilling cautionary tale about the dangers of mob mentality and rushed judgment, this William Wellman film stars Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan as cowboys who drift into a new town and find themselves drawn into a posse seeking justice for the murder of a rancher. They find some likely suspects, or at least suspects that seem likely enough to a bloodthirsty crowd. Always efficient, Wellman’s film is short and to the point, but it moves to deliberate rhythms, conveying the speed and urgency of the posse’s hunt but slowing down as their suspects endure the torture of knowing that their time on Earth may have reached an end. In a genre with no shortage of blazing guns and casual killing, The Ox-Bow Incident makes every death sting. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
28.
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
The middle entry in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy — we’ll be hitting the others a little further up the list — For a Few Dollars More sometimes gets overlooked, sandwiched as it is between the tight, revelatory breakthrough A Fistful of Dollars and the sweeping The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In many respects, it falls squarely between those two poles, but it’s also the most emotionally rich of the three. Eastwood returns, this time playing a bounty hunter who joins forces with a former Army colonel who keeps his reasons for seeking revenge to himself until the film’s finale, reasons that add a poignant undercurrent to a film that ups the violence and grunginess of its predecessor and sets up an even more ambitious follow-up. (Available to stream on Max.)
27.
Winchester ’73 (1950)
James Stewart didn’t have the easiest time returning to work after World War II. The charming comedic parts he’d specialized in before his time in the Air Force, an experience he had difficulty discussing, didn’t seem to suit him anymore, and his first film back, It’s a Wonderful Life, flopped even though it showcased a skill at playing troubled characters rarely glimpsed before. However, 1950 was a breakthrough year. He dazzled in Harvey, but it was a pair of Westerns that confirmed that he’d be a major force in the genre for years to come: Broken Arrow (see above) and this first pairing with Anthony Mann. Here Stewart plays Lin McAdam, the central figure in the story of a rare, coveted gun’s journey through the Old West, as it passes from Lin’s hands to that of an outlaw, a Native American (Rock Hudson), and others. It’s a clever device that allows Mann to explore several corners of the West and, in the process, tell a variety of stories while setting up both director and star as important voices in the genre. (Available to stream on Starz.)
26.
True Grit (2010)
John Wayne shook up his image with the 1969 film True Grit, an adaptation of a Charles Portis novel in which Wayne played the cantankerous, usually drunk U.S. Marshal “Rooster” Cogburn. It’s a fine film in its own right, but Joel and Ethan Coen’s second pass at the story is even better. Jeff Bridges takes on the Cogburn role, playing him as equal parts curmudgeon and hero as he helps the spirited, teenaged Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) track down the villain (James Brolin) who killed her father — with some help from a boastful Texas Ranger (Matt Damon). The results, which bring more of the novel’s eccentric touches to the screen, suggest Portis’s book was always meant to be a Coen brothers movie, creating a vision of the West as a weird, darkly comic place, one that requires an almost inhuman amount of dedication to bend it to its will. It gets points for keeping Portis’s bittersweet ending, too. (Available to stream on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.)
25.
The Power of the Dog (2021)
In an instantly infamous interview with Marc Maron, Sam Elliott likened the cowboys of The Power of the Dog to “those dancers, those guys in New York that wear bowties and not much else.” He meant Chippendales dancers, and though Elliott was generally wrong in his assessment of Jane Campion’s haunting, darkly funny adaptation of the 1967 Thomas Savage novel, he’s onto something by suggesting the film’s cowboys are playing a role. The brilliance of Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the sadistic, ultra-macho Phil Burbank is in Phil’s phoniness. He’s not a cowboy by birth, but — in attempting to live up to the cowboy ideal of his idol, the late Bronco Henry — he’s determined to live (and overplay) the part to the bitter end. In Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the effete stepson of Phil’s brother George’s (Jesse Plemons) new bride, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), he finds a target for his brutality: someone who’s not quite helpless as he appears against the backdrop of a Montana that’s reluctant to embrace the 20th century and say good-bye to the ways of the Old West. (Available to stream on Netflix.)
24.
The Gunfighter (1950)
“Well, there was this movie I seen one time about a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck,” Bob Dylan sings on his 1986 track “Brownsville Girl,” a song co-written by Sam Shepard. Then, without warning, he goes on to spoil the plot of this 1950 Henry King film, in which Peck plays a gunfighter whose prowess with a gun has made him a legend while putting a target on his back for any young gun hoping to make a name for himself. Dylan can’t quite remember the name of the movie, but it’s clearly made a deep impression on him anyway, no doubt in large part thanks to Peck’s haunted performance as a man for whom fame has become a trap and the reasons for that fame a source of shame that stands between him and the righteous, settled life he wants to live. It’s yet another 1950 Western that signaled a shift in the genre. Drawing on noir, it helped set the stage for a decade filled with haunted men shadowed by a past they can only dream of escaping. (Available to stream on Peacock and Tubi.)
23.
Dead Man (1995)
That same sense of fatalism hangs over every frame of Jim Jarmusch’s journey through an old, weird American West, which alternates between gritty revisionist sequences and increasingly surreal passages as it sends a Cleveland-born accountant named William Blake (Johnny Depp) on a journey toward death. Along the way he encounters everyone from a pitiless industrialist played by Robert Mitchum to a cross-dressing trader played by Iggy Pop — and, most importantly, a Native American man named Nobody (Gary Farmer) who guides him on his journey in part because he suspects Blake is the reincarnation of the poet who shares his name. A languorous Neil Young score sets the tone for a film in which Jarmusch uses starkly beautiful black-and-white images, dry humor, and Depp’s deadpan performance to create a dreamlike journey beyond the boundaries of Old West myths. (Available to stream on Max.)
22.
7 Men From Now (1956)
The first Budd Boetticher, Burt Kennedy, and Randolph Scott collaboration set the pattern for those that followed, and a high standard for them to match. Boetticher reportedly described their unifying feature as common setup: “Here comes Randy. He’s alone. What’s his problem?” Here Randy’s problem’s especially tough. Once the sheriff of Silver Springs, he now hunts for the seven men responsible for a robbery that left his wife dead, a pursuit that puts him in conflict with a tough character played by Lee Marvin and a young married couple whom he suspects might not survive their journey West without his help. Whether or not that’s his problem proves central to the plot, and more complicated than it first appears. The subsequent twists allow Boetticher and his collaborators to explore the complex matter of what it means to live justly in a dangerous world while still surviving to see the next day — a question they try to answer with this and the brisk, action-packed, but always reflective films that followed, rarely arriving at any easy answers. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
21.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
The film that made Clint Eastwood a movie star, revealed Sergio Leone as a peerless stylist, and inspired hundreds (thousands?) of imitators, this breakthrough Spaghetti Western offers a bloody, enthralling reinterpretation of the American Western as viewed from afar, with a plot on loan from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai hit Yojimbo. (The cultural exchange between Kurosawa and the Western didn’t end with The Magnificent Seven.) Eastwood plays the Man With No Name (though he’s known here as “Joe”), the character he’d spin variations on in the film’s two (loosely connected) follow-ups. A drifter and gifted gunslinger, he strolls into a town controlled by two warring factions and proceeds to play them against each other to his own benefit, saying as little as possible and letting them make assumptions about his plans. Though he ultimately takes a stand for good, the Man With No Name seems happily amoral for much of the film, less a white-hatted good guy than a disillusioned anti-hero with no interest in propping up a corrupt system or the men who run it. It’s no wonder the ’60s embraced him and Leone’s irreverent, thrilling take on the genre, one scored by Ennio Morricone’s equally groundbreaking music. (Available to stream on Max.)
20.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
Playing older than his years, John Wayne stars in the middle chapter of John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy (sandwiched between Fort Apache and Rio Grande) as a soon-to-retire captain whose final days in service find him reflecting on what it all meant as he tries to prevent a new outbreak of fighting in the days after Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn. Shooting in stunning Technicolor in his favorite location, Utah’s Monument Valley, Ford fills the film with lyrical passages while valorizing a soldier whose primary concern is preventing bloodshed rather than facilitating it. Short on plot but no less memorable for it, the film inspired critic Dave Kehr to call it “perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.” (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
19.
Shane (1953)
The fundamental conflict at the heart of the classic Western pits civilization against lawlessness and the notion that might makes right against order and justice. But not all those who fought to make the West safe for law-abiding citizens got to live in the world they helped shape. Characters who realize they have no place in the changing West float through many of the greatest Westerns (including a bunch further up, and atop, this list).
If there’s an archetypal version of that character, it’s Shane, the hero of George Stevens’s film of the same name. Played by Alan Ladd, Shane has a past he’d rather not talk about but sees the possibility of a better future in the Wyoming Territory, where settlers find themselves harassed by a land baron with no respect for their legal claims on the land. It’s there Shane befriends a local family (headed by Van Heflin and Jean Arthur) and tries to put his gunfighting ways behind him but is forced to call upon his old skills for the sake of his new friends and the life they’re trying to forge.
Stevens makes beautiful use of location photography while asking whether it will be a plough or a gun that defines the West in the years that come. A veteran of World War II, Stevens returned from the conflict determined never to make movies that glorified violence. Even while making Shane’s choices seem unavoidable, Ladd brings a tragic heaviness to his defense of the settlers and a sense that even necessary violence goes against what’s best in the human spirit. The final shot is one of the Western’s most famous images — and one of its saddest. (Available to stream on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.)
18.
3:10 to Yuma (1957)
A similar conflict between a desire to live a quiet, settled life and the need to do whatever it takes to survive plays out in Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma (the first adaptation of an Elmore Leonard story that inspired a strong remake in 2007). It even shares a cast member with Shane, Van Heflin, who plays Dan, a rancher who witnesses a stagecoach robbery but just wants to stay out of it. He’s desperate for money, however, and thus susceptible to the promise of a reward for helping ensure that Ben Wade (Glenn Ford, leering but charming) doesn’t escape before boarding a train that will take him to jail for his crimes. As they wait for the train, and the arrival of henchmen determined to set Wade free, the film explores the nature of justice and morality in an untamed land and the possibility of redemption for even the worst of men, all building to an explosive finale that takes some unexpected turns. (Available to stream on Prime Video.)
17.
High Noon (1952)
One of the most divisive of all the classic Westerns, High Noon inspired Howard Hawks to make Rio Bravo because he “didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help.” (You’ll find Hawks’s film a little higher on this list, but don’t take that as a slight to High Noon.) Others’ reasons for disliking it were more complicated, wrapped as they were in the politics of the day, which led screenwriter Carl Foreman to leave the country for Britain before its release, rightly assuming he’d soon be blacklisted for failing to cooperate with HUAC. That same political environment undoubtedly inspired the film, in which Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper), just as he’s about to retire, discovers that no one will help him against a gang of outlaws out for revenge. Letting the action unfold in something close to real time, director Fred Zinnemann builds the tension slowly, letting Kane’s mounting desperation, rather than gunfights and acts of heroism, push the film along. By the climax, it’s become a drama about a brave man — never mind Hawks’s reading — who learns just how cowardly everyone else can be when they have something to lose, and how quickly a nice town can revert back to savagery no matter how much work has been put into taming it. (Available to stream on MGM+, Paramount+, and Prime Video)
16.
Forty Guns (1957)
Director Samuel Fuller loved big emotions and shocking imagery. Forty Guns unites those passions, pitting a former gunslinger named Griff (Barry Sullivan) against a local landowner who holds power by controlling a cadre of men, the 40 guns of the title. It’s a classic Western setup complicated by the landowner being the commanding and beautiful Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), who inflames Griff’s passions and he hers. Fuller fills the film with heated drama and bold flourishes — like a dinner table where Jessica shares a meal with all 40 of her enforcers — as well as some deeply Freudian gun talk with a beautiful gunsmith, a tracking shot that seemingly runs the length of a town, and a showdown filled with extremely tightly close-ups. (Leone was doubtlessly taking notes.) It’s brash and satisfying on every level, from the action scenes to the complex, sexually charged central romance. (Available to stream on Plex and Tubi.)
15.
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Then again, when it comes to sexual chemistry and fluid gender roles, Forty Guns looks pretty tame compared to Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, released a few years earlier. Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon owner who dominates everyone she meets with her imperious attitude. (“I never met a woman who was more man,” her bartender says.) Well, almost everyone. The film puts Vienna up against Ward Bond’s John McIvers, but McIvers mostly seems to act as a cat’s-paw to Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), who hates and obsesses over Vienna. It’s all quite overheated even before the arrival of the eponymous Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), when director Nicholas Ray turns up the heat even further — almost literally in a fiery climax. The film confused audiences at the time, but it’s rightly emerged as one of Ray’s most daring attempts to push the boundaries of film drama via heightened emotions and brash visuals. In a 2008 appreciation, Roger Ebert dubbed it “one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western.” Ray discovered just how beautifully the two could fit together. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
14.
My Darling Clementine (1946)
Westerns tell some stories again and again, few as often as the confrontation between the Earps and the Clantons at Tombstone’s O.K. Corral. Though John Ford claimed to have based the fight on Earp’s account, an account Ford heard from Wyatt Earp himself, My Darling Clementine fudges a lot of the details in the interest of good storytelling. Starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, Ford regular Ward Bond as his brother Morgan, and Victor Mature as “Doc” Holliday, it’s very much a “print the legend” version of the Tombstone story, to borrow a phrase from a later Ford film.
But what a legend: In Ford’s hands, Earp’s story embodies the clash between order and chaos at the heart of the Western, a tale in which the courage of a few brave souls makes the West safe for civilization. Ford shapes it into a film filled with rousing sequences, but also lyrical asides and gentler moments that establish why the struggle matters. The title reveals a lot. Where other versions of the story bear names like Tombstone and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Ford’s emphasizes the character who symbolizes civility and the possibility of a better world to come, even if that world might have no place for men like Earp in it. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
13.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Some films were even more explicit about how changing times left some with nowhere left to call home. Released at the end of a tumultuous decade and deeply concerned with how eras end, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid brings a light touch to a story of a pair of outlaws who find themselves headed toward a dead end they didn’t see coming. Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) have grown accustomed to living well as renegades but find that the closing of the frontier and the arrival of powerful businessmen with the deep pockets to fight back against outlaws have limited their options. Directed by George Roy Hill from a script by William Goldman, it’s a film so charming — those stars help a lot — that its fatalism sneaks up on you. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
12.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The final entry in Leone’s Dollars trilogy takes everything that’s come before and makes it bigger, bolder, meaner, and even more breathtakingly exciting. Telling the story of three men — played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach — who alternately team up and betray each other in the hunt for a fortune, the film finds Leone seeing how far he can take his trademark aesthetic. Sometimes it plays like a pop-art Western, reducing the genre’s iconography to its splashiest imagery. Sometimes it plays like the Western as opera, building arias of violence and suspense with editing timed to the rhythms of Ennio Morricone’s score. It’s also ridiculously entertaining from start to finish, packing seemingly everything Leone ever wanted to do with the Western into one movie. Leone wasn’t quite done with the genre, however, as this list will attest. (Available to stream on Max.)
11.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
John Ford made all sorts of movies, but he kept circling back to the Western. Maybe that’s because he kept finding more to say with the genre, and finding more ways to express himself through it. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance feels like no other Ford film. A return to black-and-white photography on soundstages, it’s a more intimate, psychological drama than Ford’s other Westerns. The choice suits the material, a study in contrasts between two men trying to tame the West: Ranse Stoddard (James Stewart), an idealistic young lawyer, and Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a tough rancher. Both find themselves at odds with local cattle barons who hire the blackhearted gunfighter Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) to prevent Stoddard’s attempts to earn statehood for the unnamed Western territory that serves as the film’s setting. The film lets Ford pair two of the Western’s most iconic stars as they play their personas off one another while considering how the stories that shape our understanding of history get written, and who gets forgotten in the process. (Available to stream on MGM+, Paramount+, and Prime Video.)
10.
Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
Kelly Reichardt’s radically unromantic tale of survival on the Oregon Trail sweats the details, focusing on the arduous day-to-day routines involved in moving across the Oregon high desert in search of a better life. It’s a tough existence even when things are going well, and in Meek’s Cutoff they’re not going well at all. A party led by Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) starts to suspect that their leader doesn’t know what he’s doing but does nothing until the situation has already started to spin out of control. Reichardt makes their lives look exhausting, conveying the high stakes that play into every decision and the panic that sets in when those decisions seem to be leading everyone astray. In her second collaboration with Reichardt, Michelle Williams delivers a complex performance as Emily, a woman who seemingly has no say in her fate — at least at first. Reichardt’s film works both as the story of a specific wrong turn with terrible consequences and as an expression of the awful feeling created by following leaders who seem to have lost their way. (She wasn’t done with the genre, either: Reichardt returned to the West just this year with the excellent First Cow, a story of friendship and hardship among two marginal characters watching civilization take over the far frontier.) (Available to stream on Tubi.)
9.
The Naked Spur (1953)
In Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur, Ralph Meeker plays a character dishonorably discharged from the cavalry on the grounds of being “morally unstable.” (That’s a label that might easily apply to most of the characters in the film, not to mention Mann’s other Westerns.) Meeker plays one of several characters drawn into bounty hunter Howard Kemp’s (James Stewart) attempt to collect an enormous bounty on Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), a murderer and rapist wanted for killing a marshal. Vandergroat’s awful, but Kemp’s no less twisted up inside, driven by revenge, manipulating others into helping him, and unsure what to do about his attraction to Vandergroat’s companion Lina (Janet Leigh), who has conflicts of her own. No one’s purely on the side of good here, and the characters torture each other as Kemp’s obsession grows more intense and his chances to start over begin to dim. Mann and Stewart made eight raw, psychologically complex Westerns together, but none quite match The Naked Spur in intensity, or embody so thoroughly how Mann’s ’50s work transformed the genre. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
8.
Rio Bravo (1959)
Howard Hawks worked in virtually every imaginable film genre, but in each he tended to favor stories about camaraderie between disparate groups of people united for a common cause. In Rio Bravo he found a story he liked so much that he more or less remade it two more times, as El Dorado and Rio Lobo, both of which also starred John Wayne and both scripted, like Rio Bravo, by Leigh Brackett. Here, Wayne plays the wonderfully named Sheriff John T. Chance, whose defense of his drunken friend Dude (Dean Martin) pits him against some less-than-law-abiding ranchers. The film builds to an exciting climax but takes its time getting there, letting Chance and Dude rebuild their relationship as Dude crawls out from under the bottle; bringing in colorful supporting characters played by Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, and others; and occasionally pausing the action for a song or two. Yet Hawks never wastes a moment. It’s the time spent getting to know Rio Bravo’s characters that lets us worry about their fates, and that reveals what matters most to them in the life they’re fighting to protect and the laws they’re determined to uphold. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
7.
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Released the same year as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a far more genial if no less doom-laced story of outlaws facing the end of the road as the Old West era draws to a close, Sam Peckinpah’s landmark Western attracted controversy for its graphic violence, some of it depicted in agonizing detail through slow motion. Was he making audiences consider the ugliness of taking a life? Making bloodshed look disturbingly beautiful? Could he be doing both at once? Ugly, brutal, but not without its dark allure, this was the vision of the West that Peckinpah had been building toward since Ride the High Country. Here he populates the film with a band of outlaws, led by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine, charming enough to make it easy to forget — at least for long stretches — how they make their living and why they’ve come into such dire straits as they try to make one last score before calling it a day. Yet beneath the violence and gritty atmosphere — aspects of the film that would be much imitated in the years that followed — The Wild Bunch builds a story about how honor matters even to those on the wrong side of the law, and the ways even bad men can be haunted by the moments during which they’ve let greed and fear overwhelm their sense of duty. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
6.
Red River (1948)
Like Rio Bravo, Red River is a film only Howard Hawks could have pulled off. Set largely during a long, troubled cattle drive from Texas to Abilene, the film stars John Wayne as Thomas Dunson, a cattle rancher with a tragic past who grows increasingly stern and unforgiving as the drive progresses. As he threatens to turn into an Old West Ahab, his adopted son Matt (Montgomery Clift) grows increasingly concerned, and more resistant to his authority, until a confrontation becomes inevitable and a tragedy the likely outcome. Ultimately, however, Hawks has other plans, and it’s Red River’s humanity — in addition to its sweeping action — that makes it extraordinary. Hawks plays with Wayne’s persona, drawing out the shadows beneath his heroic persona while also emphasizing its tender side via Dunson’s relationship with Matt. It’s one of the most complex characters Wayne would ever play, and here he gets to play it against a backdrop of tremendous danger that threatens to destroy everything he’s built — or push him to tear it apart himself. (Available to stream on MGM+, Pluto TV, and Tubi.)
5.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Many of Robert Altman’s films, particularly in his first run of success in the early ’70s, find him putting his own spin on famous genres, be it the detective film or the war movie. With McCabe & Mrs. Miller Altman turned his attention to the Western and made one like no other before, a wistful, funny, heartbreaking film about one man’s doomed pursuit of happiness in the remote Washington town of Presbyterian Church. Warren Beatty plays McCabe, a drifter and fast-talker who falls in with, and falls in love with, Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a madam who offers to improve business at his low-rent brothel. They find success, but their newfound wealth attracts the attention of a mining company that initially wants to buy him out but uses even stronger tactics to take what it wants. Filmed in snowy Vancouver and set to some of the most melancholy songs Leonard Cohen ever recorded, the film lets a sense of fatalism hang over even its lightest moments. Beatty plays McCabe as a character too charming to lose all the time, but destined to lose big when he does. His short time on top in Presbyterian Church captures the freedom and possibilities of the American frontier, and the promise of America itself. His fate suggests that there might be less to that promise than advertised. (Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.)
4.
Stagecoach (1939)
Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? If not, Stagecoach comes pretty close. John Ford’s film made a star of John Wayne as the Ringo Kid, a fugitive from the law who’s called upon to protect a stagecoach traveling through dangerous territory. That it contains nothing less than a cross section of Old West humanity — from an alcoholic doctor to pregnant Army wife to a prostitute and so on — suggests that Ford has ambitions beyond merely staging an exciting story. Stagecoach works first as just that, but it brilliantly weaves its characters’ personal journeys into the action as the journey becomes ever more perilous. This was Ford’s first trip to Monument Valley, which would become his favorite Western location, and his first important collaboration with Wayne, whose onscreen presence he’d help shape and change over the years, giving him more complicated characters as he aged. Here he lets him play the white-hatted hero to tremendous effect in the middle of one of the most influential Westerns ever made, a tremendously entertaining, richly realized film that laid the groundwork for Ford’s future efforts in the genre and inspired countless others to take the Western in new directions. (Available to stream on Pluto TV, Prime Video, and Tubi.)
3.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
After completing the Dollars trilogy, Leone returned to the Western minus his signature star but with a renewed sense of ambition, twisting together an epic story of greed and revenge bigger than anything he’d attempted before. Charles Bronson plays a gunslinger known only as Harmonica (thanks to his musical instrument of choice) who’s locked into a battle of wills with Frank (Henry Fonda), a merciless hired gun with whom Harmonica has a mysterious history. Without losing his trademark dark humor, Leone couples the stylistic bravado of the film’s predecessors to a sense of tragic somberness, focusing on the sacrifices asked by the West and what gets lost as history moves on. He also brings a sense of patience, letting the story play out at a stately pace (at least in the director’s preferred cut) and giving space to co-stars Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards to develop what might otherwise have been stock characters. It’s audacious, too, casting Fonda as not just a bad guy but a sadist and opening with a wordless showdown for which the term “slow burn” is an understatement. It’s Leone’s masterpiece, the film in which he packed everything he wanted to say about the West and its myths. (Available to stream on MGM+, Paramount+, and Prime Video .)
2.
Unforgiven (1992)
In his Best Picture–winning 1992 film, Clint Eastwood plays William Munny, a gunfighter who, inspired by his late wife, has abandoned his old ways for the righteous life of a farmer. Financial troubles compel him to again take up bounty hunting so he can collect a reward posted by a group of prostitutes, who are seeking justice after a pair of ranch hands mutilate one of their own. Working from a screenplay that he’d held on to until he had aged enough to play Munny, Eastwood delivers a meditative, morally complex Western filled with characters who sometimes commit awful acts for righteous reasons, those who commit horrific crimes for no reason at all, and those who just do what they have to do to survive. Munny has been, at varying points, all of the above, and he’s haunted by each experience. It’s left him wondering what all the killing he’s seen and done means, if it means anything at all. Eastwood dedicated Unforgiven to the two directors who’d most shaped his career: Sergio Leone and Don Siegel, neither a stranger to this list. But while their influence can still be seen in Unforgiven, it’s an Eastwood film in every frame, the culmination of his career-long relationship with the genre, and his mixed emotions about the way it mixes heroic iconography, violence, and the sense that a man with a gun can deliver justice. (Available to stream on Apple TV.)
1.
The Searchers (1956)
John Wayne and John Ford made great movies — together and apart — after The Searchers, but that doesn’t make it any less of a culmination. Both had worked in, and thought about, the Western for years by the time they shot this haunting film. Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a man driven by a hate that’s inflamed when Comanches murder Ethan’s brother and other members of his family before kidnapping his two nieces. Ethan and his companions soon find one, Lucy, dead. The other, Debbie (Natalie Wood), they can’t find at all, leading Ethan to scour the West for her as he becomes increasingly twisted by his rage.
Wayne delivers a terrifying performance as a lost soul who uses revenge to excuse the darkness and prejudice already inside him. Through that prejudice, Ford began to address the genre’s treatment of Native Americans, not by softening the actions of the Comanches but by having Ethan respond to monstrous acts with even more monstrous behavior. In one chilling scene, he mutilates a corpse, thus condemning his victim, by Comanche belief, to travel the afterlife blind. But as Martin Scorsese observes in his documentary A Personal Journey Through American Movies, Ethan is just placing his own curse on the corpse because “he’s a drifter, doomed to wander between the winds.” | |||||
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] | 2022-09-09T12:00:08.201000+00:00 | The ideal of feminine beauty is a specific set of traits that are ingrained in women throughout their lives and from an early age to increase their perceived physical attractiveness. There have been many ideas over time and across diverse cultures of what the feminine beauty ideal is for a woman's body image. How well a woman followed these beauty ideals could influence her social status within society. Although the traits change over time and vary in country and culture, the feminine beauty t | en | https://static.parastorage.com/client/pfavico.ico | NorfolkTowneAssembly | https://www.norfolktowneassembly.org/post/standards-of-beauty-in-18th-and-early-19th-century-england-and-america | The ideal of feminine beauty is a specific set of traits that are ingrained in women throughout their lives and from an early age to increase their perceived physical attractiveness. There have been many ideas over time and across diverse cultures of what the feminine beauty ideal is for a woman's body image. How well a woman followed these beauty ideals could influence her social status within society. Although the traits change over time and vary in country and culture, the feminine beauty traits for most of history included, but were not limited to female body shape, facial features, skin tones, height, clothing style, hairstyle, and body weight. In today’s post we are going to look at the ideals of beauty in 18th and early 19th century Anglo-French and American society.
Changing Standards of Beauty
The eighteenth century, in both England and her colonies, was an era of rapid economic and social change. As a result, outward appearances could give expression to a wide range of social and cultural factors relating to class, gender, sexuality, and even political affiliation. Prevailing notions of sociability and ‘politeness’ placed great emphasis on ideals of physical beauty. In an age where disease and disfigurement were commonplace and the working classes had skin darkened and roughened by hard labor and exposure to the weather, a pale, smooth complexion was most desired as a sign of social status. Members of the aristocracy were often criticized for their heavy-handed use of face-paint and the middle-classes were ridiculed for emulating them.
The 18th Century
The perfect 18th century face was an oval with a small straight nose, slightly rosy cheeks and lips and a white complexion, typifying contemporary aesthetic ideals of symmetry, proportion, and coloring. One could easily argue that this was based largely upon the ideals of the late 17th and early 18th century. André Félibien, a French chronicler of the arts and the official court historian to Louis XIV of France, supplied the following classical description of beauty often using Venus as the ideal image:
The Head should be well rounded, and incline to small rather than large.
The Forehead white, smooth, and open (not with the hair growing down too deep upon it;) neither flat nor prominent, but like the head well rounded; and small in proportion rather than large.
The Hair either bright (blonde), black or brown; not thin, but full and waving, and if it falls in moderate curls the better.
The Eyes, black, chestnut, or blue; clear, bright, and lively, and large in proportion rather than small.
The Eyebrows, well divided, and full rather than thin; semicircular, and broader in the middle than at the ends.
The Cheeks should not be wide; should have a degree of plumpness, with the red and white finely blended; and should look firm and soft.
The Ear should be small rather than large; well folded, and with an agreeable tinge of red.
The Nose should be placed to divide the face into two equal parts; should be of a moderate size, straight, and well-squared, though sometimes a little rising in the nose may give a very graceful look to it.
The Mouth should be small; and the lips not of equal thickness: They should be well-turned, small rather than gross; soft, even to the eye; and with a living red in them. A truly pretty mouth is like a rosebud that is beginning to blow.
The Teeth should be middle-sized, white, well-ranged, and even.
The Chin, of a moderate size; white soft, and agreeably rounded.
The Neck should be white, straight, and of a soft, easy, and flexible make, long rather than short; less above, and increasing gently toward the shoulders: The whiteness and delicacy of its skin should be continued, or go on improving, to the bosom.
The Skin in general should be white, properly tingled with red; with a clear softness, and a look of thriving health in it.
The Shoulders should be white, gently spread, and with a much softer appearance of strength, than in those of men.
The Arm should be white, round, firm, and soft and more particularly so from the elbow to the hands.
The Hand should unite insensibly with the arm. They should be long and delicate, and even the joints and nervous parts of them should be without either any hardness or dryness.
The Fingers should be fine, long, round, and soft; small, and lessening towards the tips of them. The Nails long, rounded at the ends, and pellucid (translucent).
The Bosom should be white and charming; and the breasts equal in roundness, whiteness, and firmness; neither too much elevated, nor too much depressed; rising gently, and very distinctly separated.
The Sides should be long, and the hips wider than the shoulders…and go down rounding and lessening gradually to the knee.
The Knee should be even, and well-rounded. The Legs straight but varied by a proper rounding of the fleshier part of them. The Feet finely turned, white, and little.
A hundred years later in 1787, a Georgian gentleman detailed his idea of beauty. He noted that “everyone will make what alteration his own taste may suggest,” and supplied a thirty-point list:
Youth.
Stature, neither too high nor too low.
Neither too fat nor too lean.
Symmetry and proportion of all parts.
Long hair, or prettily curled, fine and silky soft.
The skin smooth, delicate, and of a fine grain. Lively white and red.
A smooth high forehead.
The temples are not sunk in.
The eyebrows in arcade, like two lines.
The eyes blue, their orbits well-fashioned, and turned to sweetness.
The nose is long rather than short.
The cheeks rounded away in softened profiles and dimpled.
A small mouth with an agreeable smile and two lips, pouting, of the coral hue.
Teeth, pearly white, even, and well set.
The chin is round, plump, and ending with a dimple.
The ears are small, and close to the head.
A neck of ivory.
A breast of alabaster, like two balls of snow, firm, self-sustained, and deliciously distanced.
A white hand, plump and long, with fingers tapering and nails of mother-o’-pearl, and oval-formed.
A sweet breath.
An agreeable voice.
A free unaffected air and carriage with a modest gait and deportment.
The shape noble, easy, and disengaged.
As we can see, not too much had changed in the period between the early and late 18th centuries.
The Early 19th Century
By the beginning of the 19th century, ideas about feminine beauty had shifted dramatically. While many of the physical traits considered to signify beauty had not changed, because of the political climate of the era romanticism of the ‘natural’ state moved to the forefront of people’s minds. The ideal nineteenth century beauty had pale, almost translucent skin, rosy cheeks, crimson lips, white teeth, and sparkling eyes. She was waspishly thin with elegant collarbones.
However, physical appearance alone was not enough to ensure that one would be seen as beautiful or socially acceptable. By 1800, ancient Greek influence had permeated period beauty ideals. The Book of Health and Beauty notes:
“The Greeks, then, conceived that beauty was necessary to inspire love; but that the power of Venus was fleeting and transitory, unless she was attired and accompanied by the Graces, that is, unless ease and affability, gentleness and spirit, good humor, modesty, ingenuousness and candor engaged the admirers that beauty attracted.”
Grace in all areas had to be entirely natural because any affectation would destroy the effect. To be considered graceful every motion needed to be free from confusion or hurry while, at the same time, being lively and animated. Not only did all the motions of the legs, hands and arms need to be graceful, but the head, neck and even her speech had to display grace as well.
The development of grace required practice, so lessons in deportment began early. Those who were teaching deportment in this period were those who had learned their social graces in the late 18th century, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment era. One such “teacher,” who wrote a series of essays on the subject, wrote:
“Politeness’ may be defined as a dexterous management of our words and actions, whereby we make other people have better opinion of us and themselves.”
Women began such practice in childhood as they learned to move properly in the long skirts required by fashion and decorum. Small steps that pushed skirts out of the way allowed a woman to appear to glide as she moved. Steps would be made from the knee, rather the hips, because swaying the hips as one walked was thought unseemly. Turns were made with the entire body allowing garments to turn elegantly and gracefully. When sitting, a woman kept her knees spread, rather than crossing her legs, to keep their skirts neat. Arms kept gracefully at one's side, emphasizing the long, elegant column of her classically inspired, empire-waist gown. If she had to cross her arms, it was done at the high waistline, so as not to spoil the line of her gown.
During the Regency/Federal/Jeffersonian era women were expected to be meek, obedient, docile, fragile, and dependent on the men in their lives. She was expected to use correct English and to avoid vulgarity in speech. A woman’s appearance was her crowning glory; therefore, a woman was expected to take care with her dress and hair. The well-bred woman was thought to have a “natural” sense of delicacy and grace which came from her training at an early age. Taste and poise, it was believed, should come naturally to her. It was a serious mark against her breeding to be seen to publicly worry about her looks.
The significance of these matters could not be underestimated, a young woman’s social standing, and her prospects for the future depended on her reputation, for once her reputation was tarnished, nothing could bring it back. For her, the utmost care to all aspects of deportment was needed since, although these patterns of deportment might appear awkward and restrictive, they safeguarded against misunderstanding and embarrassment.
She walked upright, stood, and moved with grace and ease. She kept an elegance of manners and deportment and so was never awkward in either manner or behavior. She could respond to any social situation with calm assurance. She always spoke, sat, and moved with elegance and propriety.
She was never pretentious or ostentatious. She behaved with courteous dignity to acquaintance and stranger alike but kept at arm's length any who presumed too great a familiarity.
She controlled her features, her physical body, and her speech when in company. Overt displays of emotion were considered ill-bred. Laughter was to be moderated in polite company.
Vulgarity was unacceptable in any form and was continually guarded against. Indiscretions, liaisons, and outrageous behavior were forgivable, but vulgarity never was. Icy politeness was her best weapon in putting vulgar individuals in their place.
For her to be thought 'fast' or to show a lack of proper conduct was the worst possible social stigma. For this reason, she did not engage in any activity that might give rise to gossip. For example, whether married or single, she did not call at a man's lodging.
Appropriate subjects for polite conversation include current events, describing a novel or play, telling of some recent experience, discussing poetry, music, love, or friendship. Subjects of an intimate nature such as childbirth should be avoided in polite conversation as well as puns, long arguments, gossip, and the subjects of religion and politics (although it is questionable whether gossip was truly avoided between close acquaintances). She was never to refer to any of those male activities about which a lady should feign ignorance.
When introduced to a gentleman she must not give her hand, but merely curtsey or acknowledge the person with a nod of the head. The curtsy, or other acknowledgement, was executed according to the status and relationship of the person encountered and with consideration of the circumstance.
These standards, whether from the 17th, 18th, or early 19th centuries are, to many of us living in the 21st century, problematic at best. They have many problems from today's perspective, ranging from a preference for "white" skin, to that they created an unrealistic image that society set for women to live up to. They often changed throughout the years and women were expected to change themselves to fit the image if they want to be perceived as “pretty” or “beautiful.” Today, we realize that the changing definition of beauty and the standards set by society and the media can be toxic and harmful to women.
The Norfolk Towne Assembly is publishing this article not because we agree with the ideas of women needing to meet “standards of beauty” but, because if we are to understand and portray the 18th and early 19th centuries accurately then we must have knowledge of the “standards of beauty” that were considered “normal” in that period.
Thank you for joining us for today’s post exploring “standards of beauty” in 18th and early 19th century England and America. Hopefully, this article has given you some understanding of the expectations that society of that period placed on women. Please join us again in two weeks for our next post where we will return to our occasional series on the practice of Living History with a look at the relationship of Historical Dramas on TV and Cinema to the practice of Living History.
While you are here, on our website, we would also encourage you to join our blog community (Look for the button in the upper right-hand corner of this post). This will allow us to inform you when we post new articles. We also suggest that you return to ourblog home page and sample our other articles on a wide variety of late-18th and early-19th century subjects; both military and civilian.
Finally, if you live in Virginia, Maryland, or North Carolina, we invite you to visit The Norfolk Towne Assembly’s home page to learn more about us, what we do, and how you can get involved in our historic dance, public education, and living history efforts.
References
Bell, J. (1787). The Dictionary of Love. London: British Library.
Craig, W. (1811). The Female Instructor; or, Young Woman's Companion. Liverpool: Nuttall, Fisher, and Dixon.
Distinction, A Lady of. (1811). The Mirror of the Graces; or, The English Lady's Costume. London: B. Crosby and Son.
Gisborne, T. (1801). An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. London: A. Strahan.
Hay, W. (1771). Fugitive Pieces on Various Subjects. London: J. Dodsley.
Walton, G. (2014, August 25). Ideas of Female Beauty in the 1700 and 1800s. Retrieved from Geri Walton; Unique histories from the 18th and 19th centuries: https://www.geriwalton.com/ideas-of-female-beauty-in-1700-and-1800s/ | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 79 | https://poemanalysis.com/maya-angelou/phenomenal-woman/ | en | Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou | [
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] | 2015-12-04T13:22:24+00:00 | 'Phenomenal Woman' by Maya Angelou defies the stereotypes women are often faced with today. It is a poem filled with strength. | en | Poem Analysis | https://poemanalysis.com/maya-angelou/phenomenal-woman/ | ‘Phenomenal Woman’ appeared in Maya Angelou’s third volume of poetry, And Still I Rise. It was first published in 1978. In this poem, she celebrates her body and the bodies, and positive characteristics of all women.
Angelou, who died at the age of 86 in 2014, is one of the most celebrated poets and memoirists in American literature. She’s remembered as a writer as well as a civil rights activist.
The first of her autobiographies, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was the first U.S. bestseller ever written by an African American woman. It catapulted Angelou into instant fame in the literary world. The majority of her work deals with racism and sexism she experienced as an African American woman.
‘Phenomenal Woman’ is one of her most memorable poems across her numerous volumes of poetry.
Summary
The first-person speaker of the poem ‘Phenomenal Woman,‘ presumably Maya Angelou, describes the allure she has and celebrates her identity as a woman.
Throughout each stanza, the speaker exposes the attributes she possesses that deem her irresistible to others, particularly to those of the opposite sex, despite the fact that she does not fit into society’s definition of what makes a woman beautiful.
The first stanza includes the physical traits that make her stand out, from her hips to her smile. As the poem continues, she extols the inner mystery that makes her so attractive to the men around her. She uses phrases like the “span of my hips,” “grace of my style,” “ride of my breasts,” and “bend of my hair.” She also mentions the “flash of my teeth,” “click of my heels,” and “reach of my arms.” These are examples of parallelism that all indicate the poet’s interpretation of her strength and power.
At the end of the piece, she describes the confidence and pride she has in herself, which radiates from her. In essence, this is Angelou’s anthem about her pride in being a woman.
Meaning
Angelou’s constant use of the word “phenomenal” is twofold. One most often defines the word as meaning extraordinary and impressive, and she is certainly revelling in being an extraordinary and impressive woman; however, the word phenomenal is also synonymous with unbelievable. By consciously choosing to call herself phenomenal, the speaker seems almost incredulous that she is lucky enough to be a woman. That’s why she says in the last four lines of the poem:
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Structure
Structurally, Angelou breaks her poem into four major stanzas, with a smaller yet still significant stanza in between. So, there are a total of five stanzas. While there is some evidence of rhyme, she mostly uses an unconventional rhyme scheme. She begins her poem with a couplet in the first two lines: “Pretty women wonder where my secret lies./ I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size”. While her use of rhyme is sporadic, she does, however, repeatedly end her lines with words that end in “s.” This adds to the sultry, sensual tone of the poem, particularly when it is read aloud.
Literary Devices
Throughout this poem, the poet makes use of several literary devices. These include but are not limited to:
Repetition: Angelou ends the majority of her stanzas with “That’s me.” In addition, the phrase “phenomenal woman” is repeated throughout the course of the poem, once again emphasizing Angelou’s unconventional beauty and appeal to the opposite sex.
Enjambment: seen in the transition between lines ten and eleven of the first stanza as well as lines one and two of the second stanza.
Alliteration: examples include “women wonder” in line one of stanza one and “fellows” and “fall” in lines four and five of the second stanza.
Imagery: examples include “The stride of my step, / The curl of my lips” and “Then they swarm around me, / A hive of honey bees.”
Themes
Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman’ taps on the themes of womanhood, identity, pride, self-love, and self-acceptance. The main theme, womanhood, is celebrated throughout the poem. The line, “I’m a woman,” propagates her self-confidence in being a woman. She celebrates not only her bodily beauty but also her inner glow. Another important theme, identity, is explored from the perspective of gender. She does not talk about her racial identity. Rather, her voice expresses her pride for being an attractive woman, not physically but mentally.
The themes of self-love and self-acceptance are there in this work. In the last stanza, the speaker says that her head is unbowed as she accepts how she is. She is happy with it and takes pride in the way her body radiates her inner beauty.
Detailed Analysis
Stanza One
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
(…)
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
In the first stanza, Angelou’s speaker bluntly tells her reader that other women wonder what she has that they are missing, even though she lacks the traits that society most often judges to be beautiful; she intuits that the other women are jealous of her. She writes, “They think I’m telling lies.” The speaker continues on, telling the reader her appeal lies in her arms, hips, and lips.
Her voice reflects a sense of confidence. She does not hesitate to talk about the span of her hips or the stride of her steps. Her body is unique, and she is satisfied with how she is. Besides, she doesn’t care about the so-called “fashion.” She is confident that it’s in the reach of her arms.
The last four lines of this stanza are repeated in the following stanzas with slight variations. These lines act as a refrain that expresses the speaker’s inner happiness for being a “phenomenal woman.”
Stanza Two
I walk into a room
(…)
Phenomenally.
In her second stanza, she moves away from discussing women and begins to discuss the spell she seems to have over the men she encounters. Her attractiveness goes beyond the physical: it is something innate inside her that makes her so irresistible to men. While women can change the way they look, Angelou insinuates that they will never be able to replicate what she naturally possesses inside herself.
Stanza Three
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
The third stanza contains only two lines. These lines are a part of the refrain. Separating these lines in this stanza, Angelou tries to emphasize the idea. Besides, she uses this scheme to give special stress to the words. It enhances the confident mood of the poem. As readers can see, these lines need special emphasis. The repetition of the same idea also expounds on how she feels when men hover around her like honeybees. She feels confident by thinking about men’s reactions and celebrates her phenomenal beauty.
Stanza Four
Men themselves have wondered
(…)
That’s me.
This idea continues into the fourth stanza, where the speaker discusses the fact that even men cannot pinpoint what it is about her that is so irresistible. Her answer to them is that she’s a woman. She is saying, “Unbelievably, I’m a woman. I’m an extraordinary, amazing woman. That’s who I am.”
Readers can find a metaphor in this stanza. It is present in the phrase “inner mystery.” The “mystery” is nothing but the speaker’s self-confidence. Besides, the “sun of my smile” contains another metaphor. Here Angelou implicitly compares her smile to sunshine. The “sun” is also a symbol of energy as well as self-sufficiency. So, her smile is energetic, like the sunlight.
Stanza Five
Now you understand
(…)
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
In the last lines of the poem, Angelou speaks directly to her reader after explaining her appeal to her audience. She explains that she does not need to draw attention to herself; the attention is naturally given to her because she is a woman. Her last line, set apart in its own stanza, simply says, “That’s me.” Because she is a woman—a phenomenal woman—she has the confidence and pride to walk with her head held high.
Historical Context
‘Phenomenal Woman’ was first published in Maya Angelou’s collection “And Still I Rise” (1978). Later it was published in her book of poetry “Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women” in 1995, along with Maya Angelou’s most popular poems such as ‘Still I Rise’ and ‘Our Grandmothers.’
This poem was previously published in Cosmopolitan magazine along with her ‘Just For a Time’ in 1978. The 1993 American romantic drama film Poetic Justice, it was also featured. After its initial appearance, it got a favorable response from the critics as well as the audience. Angelou often performed ‘Phenomenal Woman’, which has been called her “personal theme-poem.” Literary critic Harold Bloom considers it a “hymn-like poem to woman’s beauty.”
In an interview, Angelou said that the poem was for all women. She added, “Now, I know men are phenomenal, but they have to write their own poem.”
FAQs
Similar Poetry
Here is a list of a few poems that are similar to the themes present in Maya Angelou’s poem, ‘Phenomenal Woman.’
‘On Being a Woman’ by Dorothy Parker – This short and humorous poem describes a fickle-minded lady’s failure in love to be true to her emotions. Read more poems by Dorothy Parker.
‘A Woman’s Hands’ by Eva Bezwoda – In this poem, a wife (or a mother) proclaims her distress in the number of tasks she does for her family. Explore more Eva Bezwoda poems.
‘Black Woman’ by Georgia Douglas Johnson – This poem contains the words of a woman, desperate to have a child but unwilling to bring one into the world. Read more poems from Georgia Douglas Johnson.
‘A Woman Speaks’ by Audre Lorde – This poem is both a warrior’s song for the invisible and a conversation between women of different cultures. Explore more Audre Lorde poems. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 7 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test | en | Bechdel test | [
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The Bechdel test ( BEK-dəl),[1] also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. Some versions of the test also require that those two female characters have names.[2]
A work of fiction passing or failing the test does not necessarily indicate the overall representation of women in the work. Instead, the test is used as an indicator for the active presence (or lack thereof) of women in fiction, and to call attention to gender inequality in fiction.
The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in whose 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For the test first appeared. Bechdel credited the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and the writings of Virginia Woolf. Originally meant as "a little lesbian joke in an alternative feminist newspaper", according to Bechdel,[3] the test became more widely discussed in the 2000s, as a number of variants and tests inspired by it emerged.
History
[edit]
Gender portrayal in popular fiction
[edit]
In a 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf wrote about the one-dimensional portrayal of women in contemporary fiction:[4]
All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. ... And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. ... They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that ...[5]
In film, a study of gender portrayals in 855 of the most financially successful U.S. films from 1950 to 2006 showed that there were, on average, two male characters for each female character, a ratio that remained stable over time. Women were twice as likely as men to be involved in sexual activity, and this only continued to increase over time.[6]
According to a 2014 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, in 120 films made worldwide from 2010 to 2013, only 31% of named characters were female, and 23% of the films had a female protagonist or co-protagonist. 7% of directors were women.[7] Another study looking at the 700 top‐grossing films from 2007 to 2014 found that only 30% of the speaking characters were female.[8] In a 2016 analysis of screenplays of 2,005 commercially successful films, Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels found that in 82% of the films, men had two of the top three speaking roles, while a woman had the most dialogue in only 22% of films.[9]
Criteria and variants
[edit]
The rules now known as the Bechdel test first appeared in 1985, in Alison Bechdel's comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. In a strip titled "The Rule", two women, who resemble the future characters Lois and Ginger,[10] discuss seeing a film and one woman explains that she only goes to a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
The movie has to have at least two women in it,
who talk to each other,
about something other than a man.[11][12][13]
The other woman acknowledges that the idea is pretty strict, but good. Not finding any films that meet their requirements, they go home together.[10] The context of the strip referred to alienation of queer women in film and entertainment, where the only possible way for a queer woman to imagine any of the characters in any film may also be queer was if they satisfied the requirements of the test.[14]
The test has also been referred to as the "Bechdel–Wallace test"[15] (which Bechdel herself prefers),[16] the "Bechdel rule",[17] "Bechdel's law",[18] or the "Mo movie measure".[13] Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace, whose name appears in the marquee of the strip.[19][20] She later wrote that she was pretty certain that Wallace was inspired by Woolf's A Room of One's Own.[21]
Several variants of the test have been proposed—for example, that the two women must be named characters,[22] or that there must be at least a total of 60 seconds of conversation.[23] The test has also attracted academic interest from a computational analysis approach.[24] In June 2018, the term "Bechdel test" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.[25]
According to Neda Ulaby, the test resonates because "it articulates something often missing in popular culture: not the number of women we see on screen, but the depth of their stories, and the range of their concerns."[19] Dean Spade and Craig Willse described the test as a "commentary on how media representations enforce harmful gender norms" by depicting women's relationships to men more than any other relationships, and women's lives as important only insofar as they relate to men.[26]
Use in film and television industry
[edit]
The test moved into mainstream criticism in the 2010s and has been described as "the standard by which feminist critics judge television, movies, books, and other media".[27] In 2013, Internet culture website The Daily Dot described it as "almost a household phrase, common shorthand to capture whether a film is woman-friendly".[28] The failure of major Hollywood productions to pass the test, such as Pacific Rim (2013), was addressed in-depth in the media.[29] In 2013, four Swedish cinemas and the Scandinavian cable television channel Viasat Film incorporated the Bechdel test into some of their ratings, a move supported by the Swedish Film Institute.[30]
In 2014, the European cinema fund Eurimages incorporated the Bechdel test into its submission mechanism as part of an effort to collect information about gender equality in its projects. It requires "a Bechdel analysis of the script to be supplied by the script readers".[31]
In 2018, screenwriting software developers began incorporating functions that allow writers to analyze their scripts for gender representation. Software with such functions includes Highland 2, WriterDuet and Final Draft 11.[32]
Application
[edit]
In addition to films, the Bechdel test has been applied to other media such as television series,[33] video games[34][35][36] and comics.[37] In theater, British actor Beth Watson launched a "Bechdel Theatre" campaign in 2015 that aims to highlight test-passing plays.[38]
In 2021, a TV provider from Israel called Partner TV endorsed the test in their platforms with a special mark added to the movies who pass the test.[39]
Pass and fail proportions
[edit]
The website bechdeltest.com is a user-edited database of some 9,800 films classified by whether they pass the test, with the added requirement that the women must be named characters. As of April 2024 , it listed 57% of these films as passing all three of the test's requirements, 10% as failing one, 22% as failing two, and 11% as failing all three.[40]
According to Mark Harris of Entertainment Weekly, if passing the test were mandatory, it would have jeopardized half of the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture nominees.[22] The news website Vocativ, when subjecting the top-grossing films of 2013 to the Bechdel test, concluded that roughly half of them passed (although some dubiously) and the other half failed.[41]
A 2018 BBC analysis revealed that among the 89 films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, 44 (49%) successfully met the criteria of the Bechdel test. The study found that a higher percentage of Best Picture winners passed in the 1930s than in 2018.[42] A 2022 study found that 49.6% of the 1,200 most popular movies globally over the previous 40 years passed the Bechdel test.[43]
Writer Charles Stross noted that about half of the films that do pass the test only do so because the women talk about marriage or babies.[44] Works that fail the test include some that are mainly about or aimed at women, or which do feature prominent female characters. The television series Sex and the City highlights its own failure to pass the test by having one of the four female main characters ask: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? It's like seventh grade with bank accounts!"[19]
Films set in alternative or future worlds, such as fantasy and science fiction, are more likely to pass the Bechdel test. This may be because these genres are more likely to avoid traditional gender roles and stereotypes.[43]
Financial aspects
[edit]
Several analyses have indicated that passing the Bechdel test is associated with a film's financial success. Vocativ's authors found that the films from 2013 that passed the test earned a total of $4.22 billion in the United States, while those that failed earned $2.66 billion in total, leading them to conclude that a way for Hollywood to make more money might be to "put more women onscreen."[41] A 2014 study by FiveThirtyEight based on data from about 1,615 films released from 1990 to 2013 concluded that the median budget of films that passed the test was 35% lower than that of the others. It found that the films that passed the test had about a 37 percent higher return on investment (ROI) in the United States, and an equal ROI internationally, compared to films that did not pass the test.[45]
In 2018, the Creative Artists Agency and Shift7 analyzed revenue and budget data from the 350 top-grossing films of 2014 to 2017 in the United States. They concluded that female-led films financially outperformed other films, and that those that passed the Bechdel test (60% of the films studied) significantly outperformed the others. They noted that of films since 2012 which took in more than one billion dollars in revenue, all passed the test.[46][47]
A research study from 2022 showed that production budget was negatively associated with the probability of passing the Bechdel test across 1200 movies from 1980 to 2019. However, the observed increase of films passing across years was stronger for higher budget films. Increases of movies passing the Bechdel test over the years from 1980 to 2019 were also stronger for movies with higher revenues, and higher audience evaluations (IMDb ratings).[43]
Explanations
[edit]
Explanations that have been offered as to why many films fail the Bechdel test include the relative lack of gender diversity among scriptwriters[19] and other movie professionals, also called the "celluloid ceiling": In 2012, one in six of the directors, writers, and producers behind the 100 most commercially successful movies in the United States was a woman.[29]
Writing in the American conservative magazine National Review in 2017, film critic Kyle Smith suggested that the reason for the Bechdel test results was that "Hollywood movies are about people on the extremes of society — cops, criminals, superheroes — [which] tend to be men". Such films, according to Smith, were more often created by men because "women's movie ideas" were mostly about relationships and "aren't commercial enough for Hollywood studios".[48] He considered the Bechdel test just as meaningless as a test asking whether a film contained cowboys.[48] Smith's article provoked vigorous criticism.[49] Alessandra Maldonado and Liz Bourke wrote that Smith was wrong to contend that female authors do not write books that generate "big movie ideas", citing J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Nnedi Okorafor, among others as counter-examples.[50][51]
Limitations
[edit]
The Bechdel test only indicates whether women are present in a work of fiction to a certain degree. A work may pass the test and still contain sexist content, and a work with prominent female characters may fail the test.[17] A work may fail the test for reasons unrelated to gender bias, such as because its setting makes the inclusion of women unlikely (e.g., Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, set in a medieval monastery) or because it has few characters in general (e.g., Gravity, which has only two named characters).[52][18] What counts as a character or as a conversation is not defined. For example, the Sir Mix-a-Lot song "Baby Got Back" has been described as passing the Bechdel test, because it begins with a valley girl saying to another "oh my god, Becky, look at her butt".[53][54][55]
In an attempt at a quantitative analysis of works as to whether they pass the test, at least one researcher, Faith Lawrence, noted that the results depend on how rigorously the test is applied. For example, if a man is mentioned at any point in a conversation that also covers other topics, it is not clear whether this means that the conversation meets or fails the test. Another question is how one defines the start and end of a conversation.[15]
Criticism
[edit]
In response to its increasing ubiquity in film criticism, the Bechdel test has been criticized for not taking into account the quality of the works it tests ("bad" films may pass it, and "good" ones fail), or as a "nefarious plot to make all movies conform to feminist dogma". According to Andi Zeisler, this criticism indicates the problem that the test's utility "has been elevated way beyond the original intention. Where Bechdel and Wallace expressed it as simply a way to point out the rote, unthinkingly normative plotlines of mainstream film, these days passing it has somehow become synonymous with 'being feminist'. It was never meant to be a measure of feminism, but rather a cultural barometer." Zeisler noted that the false assumption that a work that passes the test is "feminist" might lead to creators "gaming the system" by adding just enough women characters and dialogue to pass the test,[56] while continuing to deny women substantial representation outside of formulaic plots. Similarly, the critic Alyssa Rosenberg expressed concern that the Bechdel test could become another "fig leaf" for the entertainment industry, who could just "slap a few lines of dialogue onto a hundred-and-forty-minute compilation of CGI explosions" to pass off the result as feminist.[57]
The Telegraph film critic Robbie Collin disapproved of the test as prizing "box-ticking and stat-hoarding over analysis and appreciation", and suggested that the underlying problem of the lack of well-drawn female characters in film ought to be a topic of discourse, rather than individual films failing or passing the Bechdel test.[58] FiveThirtyEight's writer Walt Hickey noted that the test does not measure whether any one film is a model of gender equality, and that passing it does not ensure the quality of writing, significance or depth of female roles—but, he wrote, "it's the best test on gender equity in film we have—and, perhaps more important ..., the only test we have data on".[45]
The Bechdel Test stirred a minor controversy in 2022 when writer Hanna Rosin invoked it in a tweet to criticize the gay romantic comedy Fire Island. Rosin's tweet was criticized for attempting to apply the test to a film about gay Asian men, a marginalized group, with some noting a film like Fire Island was not the type of film the Bechdel Test is designed to criticize.[59] In response, Alison Bechdel said on Twitter that she added a "corollary" to the test according to which "two men talking to each other about the female protagonist of an Alice Munro story in a screenplay structured on a Jane Austen novel," i.e. the plot of Fire Island, passes the test.[60][59]
Derived tests
[edit]
The Bechdel test has inspired others, notably feminist and antiracist critics and fans, to formulate criteria for evaluating works of fiction, in part because of the Bechdel test's limitations.[56] In interviews conducted by FiveThirtyEight, women in the film and television industry proposed many other tests that included more women, better stories, women behind the scenes, and more diversity.[61]
Tests about gender and fiction
[edit]
The "reverse Bechdel test" asks whether a work features men who talk to men about something other than a woman. A 2022 study that analyzed 341 popular films of the last 40 years showed that almost all (95%) passed the reverse Bechdel test, speaking to a much stronger representation of men than women.[43]
The Mako Mori test, formulated by Tumblr user "Chaila"[62] and named after the only significant female character of the 2013 film Pacific Rim, asks whether a female character has a narrative arc that is not about supporting a man's story.[56] Comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick proposed a "sexy lamp test": "If you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft."[63][64]
The "Sphinx test" by the Sphinx theater company of London asks about the interaction of women with other characters, as well as how prominently female characters feature in the action, how proactive or reactive they are, and whether they are portrayed stereotypically. It was conceived to "encourage theatremakers to think about how to write more and better roles for women", in reaction to research indicating that 37% of theater roles were written for women as of 2014 .[65]
Johanson analysis, developed by film critic MaryAnn Johanson, provides a method to evaluate the representation of women and girls in movies. Although developed for the screen, it can also be applied to books and other media. It consists of adding or subtracting points based on different categories of representation. The analysis evaluates media on criteria that include the basic representation of women, female agency, power and authority, the male gaze, and issues of gender and sexuality. Johanson's 2015 study compiled statistics for every film released in 2015, and all those nominated for Oscars in 2014 or 2015. She also drew conclusions about movie profitability when women are represented well.[66][67][68]
Tests about other characteristics
[edit]
LGBTQ+ people
[edit]
The "Vito Russo test" created by the LGBT organization GLAAD tests for the representation of LGBT characters in films. It asks, "does the film contain a character that is identifiably LGBT, and is not solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity, as well as tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect?"[69][70]
People of color
[edit]
A test proposed by TV critic Eric Deggans asks whether a film that is not about race has at least two non-white characters in the main cast,[56] and similarly, writer Nikesh Shukla proposed a test about whether "two ethnic minorities talk to each other for more than five minutes about something other than race."[71][72] A 2017 speech by Riz Ahmed inspired the Riz test about the nature of Muslim representation in fiction,[73] and Johanson analysis includes a rating of films on their representation of women of color.[74]
The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis suggested in January 2016 the "DuVernay test" (named for director Ava DuVernay), asking whether "African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories."[75] It aims to point out the lack of people of color in Hollywood movies, through a measure of their importance to a particular movie or the lack of a gratuitous link to white actors.[76]
Nadia Latif and Leila Latif of The Guardian suggested in 2016 a series of five questions:[77]
Are there two named characters of color?
Do they have dialogue?
Are they not romantically involved with one another?
Do they have any dialogue that isn't comforting or supporting a white character?
Is one of them definitely not a magical negro?
For Bella Caledonia, poet Raman Mundair contrasted Sandra Oh's character in Killing Eve lacking any reference to her Korean heritage until she "has hit a complete emotional and psychological rock bottom" with the "authentic, true and engaging" Black characters in Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You in order to suggest a more-detailed test of "representation that exists outside the context of whiteness".[78] Making reference to British East and Southeast Asian media advocacy group BEATS's 3-question test,[79] in 2021, Mundair proposed criteria for how theatrical and broadcasting performances should represent people of color.[78]
In 2018,[80] culture critic Clarkisha Kent created the "Kent Test", aimed at women of color.[81] The "Ali Nahdee Test" (formerly the "Aila Test"[82]), created by Ali Nahdee on her Tumblr blog, tests representation of Indigenous women in media.[83][84]
Orthodox Jews
[edit]
Following a controversy over misrepresentation of Orthodox Judaism in television, the nonprofit organization Jew in the City proposed the "Josephs test" for depictions of Orthodox Jews in fiction.[85] The test includes four questions:
Are there any Orthodox characters who are emotionally and psychologically stable?
Are there characters who are Orthodox whose religious life is a characteristic but not a plot point or a problem?
Can the Orthodox character find their Happily Ever After as a religious Jew?
And if the main plot points are in conflict due to religious observance — are any characters not Hasidic or Haredi and have the writers actually researched authentic religious observance from practicing members of the community they are attempting to portray?[86]
Tests about the environment
[edit]
The Bechdel test inspired a test for the presence of climate change in narratives. The "Climate Reality Check", a "Bechdel-Wallace test for a world on fire", was introduced in March 2024 and applied to the 2023 Oscar nominees.[87] Its release was covered by NPR,[88] Variety,[89] The Hollywood Reporter,[90] and other websites. The test is intended to be applied to "any story set on Earth, which takes place now, in the recent past, or in the future. It doesn’t apply to high fantasy or to stories set on other planets or in the distant past."[87] It includes two components:
Climate change exists
And a character knows it.
Tests about nonfiction
[edit]
The Bechdel test has also inspired gender-related tests for nonfiction. Laurie Voss, at the time CTO of npm, proposed a Bechdel test for software: source code passes this test if it contains a function written by a woman developer which calls a function written by a different woman developer.[91] Press notice was attracted[92][93] after the U.S. government agency 18F analyzed their own software according to this metric.[94]
The Bechdel test also inspired the Finkbeiner test, a checklist to help journalists to avoid gender bias in articles about women in science,[95] and Danielle Kranjec's "Kranjec test" of including sources written by someone who is not male on any source sheet in Torah study.[96]
The Gray test, intended to improve citational practices,[97] is named after and was created with the scholar Kishonna Gray. It requires that scholarly nonfiction texts cite the scholarship of "at least two [authors who identify as] women and two nonwhite [Black, Latino, or Indigenous] authors but also must mention it meaningfully in the body of the text." Like the Bechdel test, this was created as a "baseline test for establishing a bare minimum for responsible citation; it is not an aspirational test for best practices."[98] It is being used by scholars and academic journals to vet articles.[99][100][101][102][103]
See also
[edit]
Feminism portal
Film portal
Damsel in distress – Trope and stock character in storytelling
Finkbeiner test – Checklist to help journalists avoid gender bias
Johanson analysis – Method to evaluate representation of women in fiction
Manic Pixie Dream Girl – Stock character type
Mary Sue – Overly competent fictional character
The Bechdel Cast – Comedy podcast
Reverse harem – gender opposite of a "straight" harem
Smurfette principle – One female character in an otherwise male cast
Tokenism – Making a perfunctory or symbolic effort towards including minority groups
References
[edit]
Further reading
[edit]
Julig, Carina Lousie (February 2, 2018). "The Lesbian Roots of the Bechdel Test". AfterEllen. Archived from the original on February 2, 2018. | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 57 | https://www.loc.gov/research-centers/moving-image/about-this-research-center/ | en | Moving Image Research Center | http://www.loc.gov/static/images/favicons/open-graph-logo.png | http://www.loc.gov/static/images/favicons/open-graph-logo.png | [
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] | null | [] | null | The Moving Image Research Center provides access and information services to an international community of film and television professionals, archivists, scholars, and researchers. The Library of Congress began collecting motion pictures in 1893 when Thomas Edison and his brilliant assistant W.K.L. Dickson deposited the Edison Kinetoscopic Records for copyright. However, because of the difficulty of safely storing the flammable nitrate film used at the time, the Library retained only the descriptive material relating to motion pictures. In 1942, recognizing the importance of motion pictures and the need to preserve them as a historical record, the Library began collecting the films themselves; from 1949 on these also included films made for television. Today the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) holds approximately 1.9 million items and is responsible for the acquisition, cataloging and preservation of the Library's motion picture and television collections. The holdings complement the video recordings of the American Folklife Center, and the sound recordings served in the Recorded Sound Research Center.
Because most collections are stored offsite, researchers will need to schedule an appointment to access materials. | en | The Library of Congress | null | The Moving Image Research Center provides access and information services to an international community of film and television professionals, archivists, scholars, and researchers. The Library of Congress began collecting motion pictures in 1893 when Thomas Edison and his brilliant assistant W.K.L. Dickson deposited the Edison Kinetoscopic Records for copyright. However, because of the difficulty of safely storing the flammable nitrate film used at the time, the Library retained only the descriptive material relating to motion pictures. In 1942, recognizing the importance of motion pictures and the need to preserve them as a historical record, the Library began collecting the films themselves; from 1949 on these also included films made for television. Today the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) holds approximately 1.9 million items and is responsible for the acquisition, cataloging and preservation of the Library's motion picture and television collections. The holdings complement the video recordings of the American Folklife Center, and the sound recordings served in the Recorded Sound Research Center.
Because most collections are stored offsite, researchers will need to schedule an appointment to access materials. | |||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 16 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/femme-fatale | en | Femme fatale | Definition, History, Characters, Movies, & Facts | [
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"René Ostberg"
] | 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00 | Femme fatale, a seductive and beautiful woman who brings disaster to anyone with whom she becomes romantically involved. The femme fatale is an archetype that appears throughout history in mythology, art, and literature and became a principal character in the hard-boiled detective novels and | en | /favicon.png | Encyclopedia Britannica | https://www.britannica.com/topic/femme-fatale | femme fatale, a seductive and beautiful woman who brings disaster to anyone with whom she becomes romantically involved. The femme fatale is an archetype that appears throughout history in mythology, art, and literature and became a principal character in the hard-boiled detective novels and classic film noir of the 20th century.
The femme fatale has been dismissed as a sexist figure of male fantasy but also defended as a subversive character who transgresses women’s limited social opportunities. She is a stock character who embodies many negative tropes about women, but she is also multifaceted and complex. Her intelligence is as essential to the archetype as her beauty. It is her conniving and ambition that often drives plots.
The femme fatale archetype dates back to ancient cultures. Greek mythology, for example, is filled with female figures who lure men to ruin or death. These include Circe, who entices Odysseus’s men into her home and transforms them into pigs; the Sirens, who lead sailors to their destruction through the sweetness of their song; and Clytemnestra, who draws her husband, Agamemnon, into a false sense of security upon his return from the Trojan War and murders him. In many ancient societies, legends attribute the downfall of great rulers to the malevolent influence of a mistress. According to Chinese legend, Zhou (c. 1075–46 bce), the last sovereign of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 bce), was supposedly encouraged in his extreme debauchery by his concubine, Daji. His depravity ultimately led to the dynasty’s fall.
In the philosophy of early Christian leaders like St. Jerome, the untrustworthiness of women was prefigured by Eve, who led Adam into eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, thus dooming humankind to death and original sin. Biblical women like Salome, who demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and Jezebel, who provoked conflict that weakened Israel for decades, became synonymous with female duplicity. In Jewish folklore, Adam’s first wife was Lilith, who was expelled from Eden after refusing to be obedient to her husband. She subsequently became a demon who seduced men and gave birth to succubi, demons that assume female forms and have sex with men while they sleep.
In Romanticism, the femme fatale well-suited the movement’s ethos of tragic love and fascination with mystery and beauty. The archetype appears in many Romantic works, notably as an evil supernatural creature disguised as a lady in distress in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic ballad “Christabel,” and as the beautiful woman without pity in John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
In the 20th century the archetype flourished in film and pulp fiction. Silent movies cast so-called exotic actresses such as Theda Bara and Greta Garbo in vamp roles in which their sensual and mysterious personas entrance the luckless men who fall in love with them. Flapper types like Louise Brooks played reckless but alluring characters that countered the winsome virgins and “America’s sweetheart” roles pioneered by Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. Early films also fictionalized the stories of historical women regarded as real-life femmes fatales, such as the Egyptian queen Cleopatra and the Dutch dancer and spy Mata Hari.
The popular detective stories and crime fiction of this time almost always feature a hard-edged, amoral female character—whether an underground figure like a gangster’s moll or a more mundane character such as a dissatisfied housewife—who preys on the male hero’s weaknesses and leads him astray and into danger. Many of these stories, written by famous authors of the genre such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane, were made into movies after World War II, when the film noir style was emerging.
The prototypical film noir femme fatale is often considered to be Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944). Her character, Phyllis Dietrichson, is a calculating, dark sunglasses and gold anklet-wearing, peroxide blonde who lures an insurance agent (played by Fred MacMurray) into killing her husband and staging the murder as an accident to cash in on a double indemnity policy. Other quintessential film noir femmes fatales include those played by Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946), and Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947).
Scholars have suggested that the growing prominence of femmes fatales in the cinema and fiction of the mid-20th century may have been linked to shifting gender roles. During World War II, women took jobs outside the home and held down households while men served overseas. The femme fatale and her deceptions also suited the cynicism and dark mood of the film noir genre. Compared to the more maternal or “good girl” characters of the time, she appears as less passive and more complex and compelling. Because of the Hays Code, a set of self-imposed guidelines that restricted portrayals of immoral behavior in movies, the femme fatale was typically punished by the film’s end.
In the neo-noir films of the latter 20th century, femmes fatales reflected the social advances brought on by the feminist movement, even if they were still drawn as the kind of woman to avoid. She emerges triumphant as played by Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981) and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction (1994), two films that otherwise closely follow classic noir plots. As played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Demi Moore in Disclosure (1994), she’s a vindictive, sexually voracious, career woman. The femmes fatales played by Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974), Anne Parillaud in La Femme Nikita (1990), and Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, and Darryl Hannah in Kill Bill (2003–04) are street-smart gunrunners, trained assassins, and martial arts experts. They are as physically strong as they are alluring and beautiful. In the live-action/animated comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), the character of Jessica Rabbit (voiced by Kathleen Turner) both pays tribute to and spoofs the classic film noir femme fatale. | ||||
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] | 2024-02-13T21:00:00+00:00 | These are the 50 top romance movies of all time, chosen by Variety critics. Browse the most romantic films, from Brokeback Mountain to A Star Is Born. | en | Variety | https://variety.com/lists/best-romantic-movies/ | Set in 1963 but oh-so-’80s in its idea of hairstyles and heartthrobs, this sexy summer-camp romance defied its critics to become a classic. Nicknaming Jennifer Grey’s character “Baby” went a long way to illustrate what’s really going on here: The teenage daughter of conservative Jewish parents is forever being infantilized by her folks, until she meets a slightly older — but undeniably adult — dance teacher (Patrick Swayze) who shows her the time of her life. Corrupted by rock ’n’ roll, Baby grows up fast, getting over her initial shyness (“I carried a watermelon”) while rehearsing with her seductive instructor, who practices a racy new style of close-contact, ultra-suggestive moves that can only be read as carnal. Like “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Grease” before it, the movie plays on the fantasy of an off-limits attraction between Baby and the bad boy. — Peter Debruge
In this gold-standard screwball caper comedy, a gentleman thief, a lady pickpocket and a Parisian heiress form an elegant triangle, the preferred shape of Ernst Lubitsch — that sublime architect of romantic instability — who loved to test how seemingly solid couples might respond to a good romantic upset. Here, the temptation isn’t merely sentimental, as there’s a potential fortune on the line. What’s more, Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins) make clear from the moment they meet that each is perfectly capable of robbing the other blind. She boosts his wallet, he knicks her garter (we needn’t see the deed to be scandalized). The movie came out before the Production Code, and it sparkles with the kind of naughty innuendo that was soon prohibited in Hollywood, but which Lubitsch was sophisticated enough to suggest even behind closed doors. — PD
A man falls in love with a mermaid: What could be simpler, or sweeter, than that? Yet Tom Hanks, in the movie that made him a movie star, does not go lightly into his communion with a woman who’s half-fish. Ron Howard’s landmark comedy was one of the first films to demonstrate that a high-concept premise could be executed in a way that was artful and classic: a throwback to the Hollywood that used fantasy to put us in touch with reality. Daryl Hannah, as Madison the red-tailed mermaid, acts with a dazed curiosity and eagerness that’s irresistible, and Hanks turns his disgruntlement into a profound expression of love’s challenge – namely, that we can’t choose who we love, but we can choose to embrace the love that chose us. — Owen Gleiberman
Amid a career of macho performances, Clint Eastwood tapped into his sensitive side to deliver one of his most indelible characters in Robert Kincaid, a National Geographic photographer on assignment in Iowa, who stops by a farmhouse to ask for directions. He’s greeted by Francesca, a lonely war bride who offers to show him around (an Italian-accented Meryl Streep, who says so much in her silent gestures, like the way she absentmindedly touches herself in the places she wants to be caressed). It’s no big surprise that this dissatisfied housewife develops feelings for this stranger. More touching is Kincaid’s admission that he’s fallen for Francesca, too, but knows she has no intention of leaving her family. Still, that doesn’t stop him from trying. “This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime,” he tells her. The sight of Kincaid looking desperate in the rain, the downpour likely masking tears, is so radically counter-Eastwood, you’ve gotta believe it. — PD
In the two decades since “The Notebook,” Ryan Gosling has cultivated his image as a chiseled heartthrob to such a degree that he seemed the perfect choice to play a live-action Ken doll in the “Barbie” movie. But back when director Nick Cassavetes was casting the role of Noah Calhoun, he saw the actor (and former Mouseketeer) differently — as someone both relatable and reckless enough to chase his dream girl (Rachel McAdams’ Allie) up a Ferris wheel. No matter what Allie does, he keeps on loving her in the best possible version Hollywood can make of a Nicholas Sparks novel. The secret formula here comes in catching up with Noah and Allie half a century later, as played by screen legends James Garner and Gena Rowlands, coupled with the tear-jerky reason we’ve been reliving all their most romantic memories. — PD
The colors gush in Douglas Sirk’s lush 1950s melodrama, about a New England widow, Cary (Jane Wyman), who falls for the studly but respectful hunk (Rock Hudson) who tends the trees at her house. It may be love, but her two grown children — and nearly the entire community — are disapproving of Cary’s feelings, pressuring her to break off the relationship. Seen today, neither the age difference nor the class divide seem like deal-breakers, which makes Cary’s sacrifice seem all the more futile. (Years later, Todd Haynes updated the dynamic with a Black gardener and a still-living gay husband in “Far from Heaven.”) During the 1950s, Hudson carved out a niche as a sensitive leading man, to the point that he’s almost pathetic here (consider the state of him in the final scene). Others may try to meddle, but in the end, it’s her decision alone whom she loves. — PD
You might ask: How romantic could a musical this notoriously G-rated and squeaky-clean really be? But if “The Sound of Music” has incandescent songs, as well as a singular true-life story about the Von Trapp Family Singers (seven motherless Austrian children returned to vitality through the life force of Julie Andrews’ nun-turned-governess Maria), the movie’s secret weapon is its love story. Andrews, while she’s certainly playing the soul of goodness, invests her slow-blooming affection for Christopher Plummer’s Capt. Von Trapp with an almost forbidden sense of broken decorum. And Plummer, who looks like he belongs in a far darker movie, plays the captain as a lost man literally coming back to existence. When these two dance and realize, at the very same moment, that they’ve fallen in love, it’s one of the most electrifying scenes in movie history. — OG
It’s not unusual to see a musical scale the heights of romantic passion. What’s different about John Carney’s film is that it’s a small-scale, non-stylized, kitchen-sink indie drama, yet in its lo-fi and platonic way it uses songs to create the majesty and devotion of a musical daydream. On the sidewalks of Dublin, a 30ish busker (Glenn Hansard) strums a guitar with a worn-out hole where the pick board should be. Most folks pass him by, but a girl (Markéte Irglová) lingers. They’re drawn into each other’s orbit, and though we never learn their names, a romance — or is it? — begins to play out in the songs they sing together. They both have other relationships, yet ”Once” tells the delicate tale of how, through song, these two save each other. As they give themselves over to numbers like “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” the movie swoons, and you will too. — OG
Some think of it as the ultimate guilty-pleasure rom-com. Others say that its story of a wealthy businessman (Richard Gere) who hires an escort (Julia Roberts) for a week to be his public romantic partner represents Hollywood at it most reprehensibly sexist. The truth, however, falls right in between. “Pretty Woman” only got tagged with the guilty-pleasure label because it came out at the dawn of the modern rom-com era (it sparkles like Tracy and Hepburn next to a lot of the films that came afterward). And as far as morality goes, it’s not the movie that’s sexist. It’s the world of high-gloss commodification that Vivian, played by Roberts not just with the boldest smile of her era but with the vivacity that turned her into a singular movie star, must navigate. Look closely at the dance of chemistry and arbitration between Roberts and Gere, and you’ll see that “Pretty Woman,” in its slickly-packaged-by-director-Garry Marshall way, is nothing less than a screwball celebration of the politics of love. — OG
Mira Nair took a pioneering risk in depicting the romance between Demetrius (Denzel Washington), a blue-collar Black carpet cleaner, and Mina (Sarita Choudhury), a young Indian woman whose family fled Uganda to the American South. Set in Greenwood, Miss., where locals helped the creative team finesse the authenticity of the movie’s dialogue and detail, Nair’s contemporary interracial romance confronts the pushback of both the African American and South Asian communities to Demetrius and Mina’s relationship. But unlike Sidney Poitier social drama “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” her parents’ reaction makes up just a fraction of the script, which gives complex backstories to each side of the couple. It’s also incredibly sexy, whether they’re chatting by phone in separate beds or sharing the same one in the movie’s scorching love scene. The movie argues for colorblindness while celebrating both cultures, modeling a relationship never before seen on screen. — PD
“Optimism is a revolutionary act,” writer-director Cameron Crowe quips in the commentary for his late-’80s teenage touchstone. That kind of radical confidence drives high school senior Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), who musters the nerve to ask out valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye), even though all his peers think she’s out of his league. At first, Lloyd may seem like a nobody when compared to his most-likely-to-succeed sweetheart, but over time, he proves to be loyal, decent and unflappably sincere — qualities that made him the model boyfriend for kids of the ’80s. The clincher: Even when dumped, he shows up with a boombox, blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” outside her window. The gesture became an iconic declaration of love for a generation … and still holds up, even if the technology is obsolete. — PD
Today, it would probably be a rom-com about opposites attracting: Katie (Barbra Streisand), a wisecracking Marxist Jewish political activist, and Hubbell (Robert Redford), a debonair WASP writer born with the entitlement not to have to worry about “causes.” But 50 years ago, when the story was filmed by director Sydney Pollack not as a comedy but as a romantic drama of tumultuous love-hate passion, the film, in its high-end soap-opera way, seemed to be expressing something new in the culture — the way that love, after the 1960s, was no longer going to be asking people to stay in their ethnic lanes. “The Way We Were” is a hefty slice of middlebrow Hollywood corn, yet the irresistible tug of it is that Streisand and Redford embody their characters on a level of romantic mythology. And let’s not forget the power of that title song! As sung by Streisand, it’s the incarnation of nostalgic beauty. — OG
Movies that involve romantic stories of same-sex couples are inevitably placed in a category called “gay” or “queer” or whatever, often by their biggest fans. Yet if you think about it for five seconds, that’s a retrograde way of putting movies into boxes. The director Todd Haynes has made several masterpieces (“Far From Heaven,” “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story”), but he has never made a drama more darkly romantic and enticing, more seductive in its suspense, more mired in the agonizing compulsion of love than this lavishly mesmerizing adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel “The Price of Salt.” During the Christmas shopping season, Therese (Rooney Mara), a New York department-store clerk, meets Carol, a woman of the world played by Cate Blanchett with a femme fatale swagger just this side of threatening. Their relationship will be fraught with the drama of divorce, blackmail, a private detective, and other elements that, as staged by Haynes, acquire the heightened quality of a vintage film noir. The final scene, set in the bar of the Oak Room, features one of the most transporting locked-gazes-across-a-crowded-room moments you’ll ever see. — OG
Is there anything more romantic than someone jumping in front of a bullet for you? Technically, that’s Frank Farmer’s job, but by the time Kevin Costner’s clean-cut, ex-Secret Service agent leaps in to protect endangered diva Rachel Marron (Whitney Houston) — on Oscar night, no less — we know he’s acting out of love more than duty. Frank sweeps both audiences and Rachel off their feet much earlier in the film, during a concert meltdown where he lifts her up and carries her through the mob — a chivalrous image immortalized on the film’s poster. Amazingly enough, “The Bodyguard” never made a big deal of its interracial romance, and that itself was a big deal. Powered by one of the all-time great soundtracks, the pop blockbuster is a classy entry in the oft-smarmy category of R-rated ’90s thrillers. Recent talks of a remake raise the question of which couple could out-sizzle Costner and Houston. — PD
Marriage, they say, has its ups and downs. But it’s doubtful that any movie has ever dramatized the ebb and flow of feeling in a relationship with the primal power of F.W. Murnau’s silent classic. In outline, it could almost be a murderous film noir: A man — known only as The Man (George O’Brien), and haunted by better times with his wife, known only as The Wife (Janet Gaynor) — leaves the farmhouse where they live with their child to be with a woman from the city (Margaret Livingston). She wants him to drown The Wife, and part of the film’s shock is that he nearly does. But “Sunrise” proceeds as a series of shocks, which have the effect of jolting love back to life. Shot as a kind of sensuous living daydream, it is the cinema’s most profound and stirring roller-coaster of passion, an affirmation of what it means for two people to be meant for each other. — OG
Presented as a beloved fairy tale passed down between generations, screenwriter William Goldman’s tongue-in-cheek riff on classic adventure tales takes the best parts of nearly a century of cinematic love stories and remixes them for the home-video set (the goal was to get through to media-savvy audiences who thought they’d seen it all). Starting with two impossibly beautiful leads in Cary Elwes and Robin Wright, he builds a legend of swashbuckling pirates, dangerous rescues and well-earned revenge, describing it all (via kindly narrator Peter Falk) as the ultimate example of the form. That’s an impossible tall order — a genre-straddling smorgasbord the studio didn’t know how to market at the time — which director Rob Reiner miraculously achieves by enlisting an astonishing ensemble. Everyone from Billy Crystal to Christopher Guest, Wallace Shawn to Andre the Giant assemble to support the sacrifice Westley makes to save his beloved Buttercup from marrying the wrong guy. — PD
Two men and a woman sit at a bar, and before the audience knows anything about them, we try to figure out what their relationship is. Who belongs with whom? That we can’t entirely tell is key to what makes Celine Song’s remarkable drama such a haunting fable of love’s enigma. It turns out that Nora (Greta Lee), a New Yorker born and raised until the age of 12 in South Korea, is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a mouthy homegrown American she met at a writers’ retreat. The other man, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), is the childhood friend Nora has maintained ties with; he’s at once her past, the spirit of her homeland, and maybe her romantic partner in another avenue of existence. “Past Lives” is a movie that will strike chords of recognition in any true romantic, as it’s about the secret journey that love takes: a communion that may occur in this life, or that may just be waiting for the next one. — OG
It’s one of the most poetic distillations of romantic desire in all of movies; you could also call it the “Splash” of its day. Jean Marais plays the Beast, who in Jean Cocteau’s film is a kind of delicate aristocrat with the face of a courtly lion. Josette Day is Belle, who ends up imprisoned in the Beast’s castle to work off a debt accrued by her father. What follows is an intricate fairy tale of deception and magic, built around the luminous ingenuity of Cocteau’s visual effects. Yet the most magical thing about it is the bond that develops between Belle and her disarmingly chivalrous captor/lover, a character so touching in his passion that when Greta Garbo saw the movie, it’s reported that she reacted to his death at the end by crying out, “Give me back my Beast!” — OG
The title of this Y2K sports classic references two very different games, and the rules aren’t fair in either one. After discovering that they both love basketball, Monica cockily challenges childhood friend Quincy to a match (later, famously, she’ll play for his heart). Monica wins that first bout, but he winds up injuring her — an early sign that the dynamic is different when two sexes occupy the court at the same time. That gap widens as they grow up (into Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan). He finds it relatively easy to follow in the footsteps of his NBA-pro dad, whereas there’s no equivalent path for female players. Writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood empathizes with Monica, who watches fame go to her old friend’s head. Per the formula, audiences are conditioned to root for the romance to work out, but basketball occupies a bigger part of Monica’s heart, and the movie finds the perfect solution. — PD
Italian director Luca Guadagnino (“I Am Love”) turned André Aciman’s ecstatic, wildly overwritten novel of a formative first love between teenage Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his father’s slightly older — but still relatively inexperienced — teaching assistant, Oliver (Armie Hammer), into a sensual summer dream. There’s an intensity to the sights, sensations and emotions that imprints itself on audiences, such that Elio’s memories become our own. One needn’t be gay to recognize the significance that such an all-consuming early infatuation can leave on a young person’s romantic identity, though the movie offers a welcome message to all who’ve struggled to come to terms with their own sexuality in the eloquent heart-to-heart between the boy and his surprisingly understanding dad: “How you live your life is your business. Just remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once,” he says. “Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt.” — PD
For a director who was known as the thrillingly precise and methodical Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock was not shy about portraying romantic rapture. A number of his films (“To Catch a Thief,” “Notorious,” “Rear Window”) are entrancing love stories, but in “Vertigo” he dove deep into an almost private zone of love-as-fetishistic-obsession. James Stewart’s middle-aged detective falls for the woman he’s hired to follow — played, with a depressive carnality, by Kim Novak, who also plays the woman’s shop-girl look-alike, who Stewart then feels compelled to transform into the first woman. No classic Hollywood movie balances love on the precipice of kink and danger the way this one does, which is why “Vertigo” opened the door to everything from “Blue Velvet” to the career of Brian De Palma. — OG
Damien Chazelle’s glorious, heartrending, bittersweet musical does an extraordinary job of retro-fitting the song-and-dance pleasures of vintage Hollywood into the sunlit freeway landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Yet the film’s most radical feature is the way it brings Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress, together with Seb (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist drowning in his own purity, and celebrates their union with intoxicating affection — only to show you how their love crashes on the shores of warring egos. What lifts “La La Land” into the realm of transcendently moving love stories is that it presents a happy ending that almost happened, and that could have happened if only life had turned out a bit different. — OG
Dramatically speaking, the most exciting part of a relationship occurs either during the time a couple is falling in love or else at the moment it’s falling apart. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman incorporates both aspects — albeit as endangered flashbacks — while exploring a fantasy that anyone who’s been through the emotional wringer of a relationship can identify with: What if you could erase all traces of an ex from your memory? Director Michel Gondry proved the perfect partner to visualize the sketchy sci-fi apparatus that makes a brain scrub possible for Joel (Jim Carrey), who realizes halfway through that, however painful, he can’t live without any trace of his soulmate, Clementine (Kate Winslet), the manic free spirit with the Kool-Aid-colored hair. As Joel tries to hold on to the good times while his mind’s being wiped, Kaufman allows audiences to absorb their best memories and make them our own. — PD
Hugh Grant stammered his way into our hearts, fumbling and fluttering his eyelids the whole way, in a delightfully English rom-com from screenwriter Richard Curtis (who juggled no fewer than eight couples in his 2003 directorial debut “Love Actually”). This more streamlined love story starts where practically every Jane Austen story ends: at the altar. Grant’s not the one getting hitched at those opening nuptials, though he does fall hard for an American guest played by Andie MacDowell. Their courtship is unconventional (it amounts to shagging anytime their friends tie the knot), but the chemistry is undeniable. When it’s time for Charles and Carrie to get married, however, each of them says their vows with someone else. So how do they wind up together? It’s the little surprises that delight. — PD
In terms of sheer sex appeal, it’s hard to top the chemistry between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, who play an incorrigible bank robber and the U.S Marshall tasked with apprehending him in Steven Soderbergh’s sultry, time-skipping Elmore Leonard adaptation. It’s steamy from the start, as a prison break leaves cop and quarry stuffed in a trunk together — a cozy way to get acquainted. Four years after “Pulp Fiction,” the picture came at a moment when Soderbergh was experimenting with film editing and features several nifty innovations, including an unconventional love scene that turns up the heat by cutting between flirtation and payoff. In one thread, Jack Foley and Karen Sisco roleplay in the hotel bar, pretending to be strangers. Skipping ahead, it teases glimpses of the “time out” where all this cocktail talk is headed: a striptease upstairs, in which the pair put aside their differences long enough to make love. — PD
Great as he is, we don’t tend of think of Daniel Day-Lewis as an overwhelmingly romantic movie star. In Philip Kaufman’s heady, intoxicating, high-wire adaptation of the Milan Kundera novel, he plays Tomas, a character who is very much a fickle Lothario — a randy physician in 1960s Prague who bounces from one conquest to the next, though he does have a regular thing going with Sabine (Lena Olin), an artist who likes to spice their lovemaking with mirrors and bowler hats. But then Tomas meets Tereza (Juliette Binoche), whose gravity pulls him down to earth. And then the Soviet tanks come rolling in, blowing up all their lives. When that happens, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” becomes one of the most seriously moving love stories in cinema, a tale of three lost souls yearning to connect, to survive, to unlock love’s mystery. — OG
For 30 years, the Judy Garland/James Mason version of “A Star Is Born” was tainted by the messy circumstances of its making. The script kept getting rewritten, Garland was a notoriously unstable presence on set, and when the movie premiered in New York, it was three hours long — but executives at Warner Bros. then chopped it by half an hour, without so much as consulting the director, George Cukor. Yet when the movie was re-released in the ’80s, its reputation was elevated in a way that’s comparable to what happened with Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” A world of moviegoers discovered that Cukor had crafted one of the most darkly entrancing love stories ever made. Its haunted spirit of rapture and loss is incarnated in Garland’s performance of “The Man That Got Away,” in Mason’s jaw-dropping drunken slap of Garland during a scene set at the Oscars, and in the tragic finale, which touches the secret heart of love: the faith necessary to sustain it. — OG
Repression and strict social restraints are constantly keeping lovers apart in the works of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who together made a career’s worth of exquisitely nuanced literary adaptations frequently (and often unfairly) lumped in with lesser, made-for-TV costume dramas. While “A Room with a View” and “Maurice” are more overtly passionate, the trio’s take on Kazuo Ishiguro’s celebrated novel offers a heartbreaking portrayal of a couple kept apart by codes beyond their control. In this case, a butler (Anthony Hopkins) born and raised to serve the English aristocracy is so mindful of his place that he can’t bring himself to tell the housekeeper he adores (Emma Thompson) his true feelings. It’s wrenching to watch this docile attendant struggle between emotions for a colleague and devotion to his job, and yet, between the lines, and in these two masterful performances, are written volumes. — PD
The director Alex Cox brought off something singularly audacious by centering a punk biopic on Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols’ bassist and all-around showman-fuckup who was so dissolute most of the time that he could barely play his instrument or keep from nodding out. Yet the ultimate audacity of Cox’s film is that it dares to present Vicious’s relationship with Nancy Spungen, the torn-fishnet groupie from suburban Pennsylvania who turned him into a heroin addict, as if they were the Tristan and Isolde of the rock ‘n’ roll gutter. As Sid, Gary Oldman gives what may still be his greatest performance, and Chloe Webb, as Nancy, gives what is simply one of the most powerful performances in the history of cinema. Her Nancy is a caterwauling liar and junkie, such a damaged shard of a human being that it tears your heart apart just to behold her. Nancy and Sid are barely functional narcissist addicts, yet their love affair is fused on an animal level; they need each other to live, and to die. “Sid and Nancy” is raw and exhilarating — the greatest of all music biopics, and (not so incidentally) the most romantic. — OG
Told through poetic glimpses over three separate chapters in the life of its main character, “Moonlight” doesn’t feel like a love story at first. Director Barry Jenkins introduces Chiron at age 10, too young to recognize his own homosexuality, and yet already being teased as soft by his peers. In the middle segment, the boy meets Kevin, with whom he starts to explore his feelings, only to have that possibility derailed by bullying. Subverting stereotypes at every turn, the movie gives this lost soul a second chance in the final stretch, focusing on a tender, tentative reunion between Chiron (bulked up and thick-skinned from his time in prison) and his former crush. By this point, audiences are so invested in the character that “Moonlight” broke free of the rigid box that confines most queer stories to LGBT audiences, making it a crossover success and historic Oscar winner. — PD
The dialogue still zings and the heartbreak still stings in Billy Wilder’s ahead-of-its-time depiction of two Manhattan office drones who are both exploited by the same manager: Jack Lemmon plays ultra-cynical insurance salesman Bud Baxter, while Shirley MacLaine is Fran Kubelik, the elevator girl who brightens his days … but loves his boss. The plot (which involves Bud lending his place to higher-ups to schtup their secretaries) anticipates the #MeToo movement, while also acknowledging the reality that well-intentioned workers frequently fall for their colleagues. Bud goes about it the relatively respectful way, while Fran’s plight illustrates how unfair the world can be to those who mix business and pleasure. For audiences that love “Mad Men,” but identify with the underdog, the movie poses a wonderfully adult conundrum — one which forces Bud to decide between personal ethics and professional ambition, knowing it could all go sideways for him, career-wise. — PD
In the New Hollywood ’70s, a great many aspects of classic big-screen romance — the unabashed yearning, the sparkle, the lock-step gender roles — began to fall by the wayside. There was a lot of chatter about how romance itself was fading out of the culture. But that’s part of what made “An Officer and a Gentleman” loom so large. In its meticulous throwback of a story about a drifter, played with pinpoint narcissistic glamour by Richard Gere, who enlists in the Navy and falls for one of the “Puget Sound Debs” (Debra Winger) who want to marry a future jet pilot, the movie seemed to bring back, for the post-feminist era, the kind of shamelessly ardent love story that had fallen out of fashion. It helped that director Taylor Hackford infused it all with a contempo grittiness. As a basic-training movie, “Officer” anticipated much of ”Full Metal Jacket,” but what makes it indelible is the hungry desire enacted by Debra Winger, whose gaze of soulful adoration brings Gere fully alive as a romantic actor. — OG
Cinema could hardly conjure a more lovely or elegant couple than cigarette-smoking Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who floats through stairwells in form-fitting cheongsams. Operating on the wisp of a plot, improvised and evolved over nearly a year, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai denies these two beautiful avatars a conventional romance. They play neighbors who discover that their spouses are having an affair, and rather than sink to the same level, they indulge in a bit of imaginative detective work, reenacting how their partners might have met. This thin outline leaves near-infinite room for Wong to evoke a subjective range of responses from his audience, using the full range of cinematic tools — color, costume, gesture, music — to solicit a different reading from each viewer. Your mileage may vary, but keep in mind: Wong’s a feel-maker as much as a filmmaker, rewriting the rules via this elliptical dance between unrequited lovers. — PD
At early test screenings, audiences weren’t falling for Norman Jewison’s now-classic New York romance the way they were supposed to, until he laid the tune “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie…” over the opening credits. Cher tamped down her natural glamour to embody pragmatic Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini, who’s ready to settle for Johnny’s (Danny Aiello) passionless marriage proposal when she meets his brother Ronnie, played by a hot-blooded Nicolas Cage. Let’s just say, Ronnie gives this sensible Catholic woman reason to go to confession. The script by John Patrick Shanley is all but bursting with culturally specific detail, from drool-worthy dishes to unusual superstitions, but it’s the colorful ensemble — family members who want what’s best for Loretta — that ultimately serves to validate her seemingly reckless choice. After a lifetime of listening to her head, she finally decides to follow her heart. That’s amore! — PD
Charlie Chaplin stubbornly resisted the film industry’s embrace of sound, releasing this silent treasure into a sea of talkies. Cinema may have gone a different direction, but his stubborn adherence to pantomime (plus his obsessive need to reshoot every shot until perfect) makes this love story seem all the more timeless, as Chaplin’s signature character, the Tramp, falls for a blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill). She mistakes him for a wealthy man, and the Tramp allows her to go on imagining him that way in the most poetic version of a familiar rom-com trope ever committed to film: At some point, he’ll have to come clean. Will she still love him when she discovers the truth? The final scene, in which she recognizes the vulnerable fool after her vision has been restored, not by sight but by contact, ranks among the medium’s most romantic. — PD
Of the many qualities that made it a revolutionary movie, two stand above all others. The first, and most talked about, is how violent it was — the bystander shot through the eye, the climactic slow-motion blood ballet, and everything else that rubbed the audience’s nose in what being a criminal really meant. But the other quality that defined “Bonnie and Clyde” was how shockingly sultry and romantic it was. The ads for the movie said, “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people.” The subtext was that something in the connection between Faye Dunaway’s torrid hunger and Warren Beatty’s vulnerable stud glamour was itself so dangerous that it was lethal. Just check out the two stars’ faces as they exchange one last look before being strafed to death by a hail of bullets. That look is the essence of true love. — OG
Taken by itself, 1995’s “Before Sunrise” represents the perfect encapsulation of young love: Two strangers meet on a train, get off together in Vienna and spend the night walking and talking (there’s some debate as to whether they make love, as the movie’s too modest to show it). Nine years later, director Richard Linklater delivered one of the most satisfying sequels of all time in “Before Sunset,” reuniting with his two characters, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy), in Paris. Their time is once again limited, but now, the conversation deals with their regrets. But the attraction remains, and the movie ends with the implication they wind up together. But is it happily ever after? Linklater and company caught up with the pair once again with “Before Midnight,” and the movie finds them together, but dissatisfied, acknowledging the challenges that confront couples after nearly a decade together. It was impossible to guess when they first met how deep this relationship would go, and still anybody’s guess how it will end. — PD
“I lurve you,” says Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer, coming about as close as he can to declaring his feelings for Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), the beguiling thrift-shop space cadet who charmed the world with her la-di-da innocence. Allen’s late-’70s classic was, at the time, a new kind of love story — the saga of a “relationship,” which is to say a partnership not truly built to last. And maybe Alvy Singer had to say “lurve” instead of “love” because, deep down, he wasn’t really sure that he could commit himself to the L-word. Yet the magic of “Annie Hall” is that is channeled how an entire generation had come to regard love in the age of therapeutic navel-gazing: as something intoxicating yet transient, rooted in a seems-like-old-times nostalgia that felt more at home looking back than forward. — OG
Tom Cruise had always been a solo vessel — a cruise missile of a movie star. It was Cameron Crowe’s inspiration, in casting Cruise as a sports agent who gets tossed out of the game and has to reinvent himself as a better person in order to come back, to pair Cruise with Renée Zellweger, an unknown actor who did not come off like some female-movie-star equivalent of Tom Cruise. She had a homespun allure that seemed to be calling his cockiness, his very stardom, on the carpet. The beauty of the line “You complete me” is that Cruise seemed, at last, to be letting down the guard of a dozen years of mega-stardom. The beauty of “You had me at hello” is that it reminds us of how easy love is when it’s real. — OG
Audrey Hepburn plays the fed-up crown princess of an unspecified country in this escapist romp through the Eternal City. The project kicked off a seven-picture run with Paramount, during which she may as well have been the queen of Hollywood romances: “Sabrina,” “Funny Face,” “My Fair Lady” and more. Suffocating under the obligations of her position, she sneaks out during a European tour, landing in the hands of Gregory Peck’s dishonest (yet honorable) American newspaperman. He thinks he’s hit the jackpot, betting his editor he can deliver an exclusive interview with the princess — but he doesn’t gamble on falling for the dame. Their whirlwind romance lasts but a day, but in that time, the reporter gives Ann/Anya/Audrey a taste of freedom. She plays it coy for most of the movie, but the closeup on her face at the end says it all. — PD
The scene where Clark Gable carries Vivien Leigh up the stairs, with intimations of (to put it mildly) erotic coercion, would not pass muster today. Yet that scene, and others that rhyme with it, are part of what make the most epic of Old Hollywood love stories one of the most darkly complicated and enthralling of Old Hollywood love stories. Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara is fierce, strong, manipulative — the Southern belle as aristocratic vixen — and so she and Rhett Butler are destined to turn love into a battle that’s doomed to end in a draw. But what heat and light their fireworks give off! “Gone with the Wind” is a movie that’s now seen as “problematic,” yet one of the most seemingly imperfect things about it — the alternating currents of sex and anger, devotion and contempt that fuel the central relationship — is what makes it such a tumultuous classic. — OG
A couple needn’t end up together for a love story to stand the test of time. In the case of Jacques Demy’s bittersweet musical, there’s a relatable quality to the way circumstances keep a working-class French couple from their happily ever after. That downbeat fate serves to balance the bright colors and bold choice of delivering every line of dialogue, no matter how banal, through song. That recitative strategy is common enough in opera, but downright revolutionary on film, still fresh and highly unusual all these years later. Naive young Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve, doll-like at 19) sells umbrellas in the family shop. Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) fixes cars at a nearby garage. They seem destined to be together, until military service calls him away. Michel Legrand’s score leans into the melancholy what might have been in what feels like a snow globe rendering of real life. — PD
It’s a queer love story set entirely in the closet. Yet by dramatizing the inner lives of two cowboys who find a romantic home on the range in early 1960s Wyoming, Ang Lee’s breathtaking adaptation of the Annie Proulx short story undermined every expectation of contemporary audiences. In showing us two men who discover a love that they themselves think is forbidden, the film dramatizes how prejudice can worm its way into the very fabric of people’s lives; it also demonstrates that the myth of the straight-as-an-arrow American macho he-man is just that – a myth. At the same time, our yearning for Ennis and Jack to make a life for themselves becomes overwhelming in its heartbreak. The performances of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are indelible — and, in Ledger’s case, miraculous, as he turns the muffled, barely articulate Ennis into a living metaphor for a love that cannot speak its name. — OG
It’s a love story, a ghost story, a corporate crime story, a pottery story, and a movie in which Whoopi Goldberg plays the world’s funniest cut-up mystic. But who would have guessed that just four months after “Pretty Woman,” it would be the headiest romantic movie of its year? The director, Jerry Zucker, was a veteran of the “Airplane!” troupe, yet somehow he juggled all these elements to touch a chord of pure fairy-tale rapture, spinning out the story of a New York banker who’s killed by a mugger and returns as a ghost to protect his artist girlfriend. The way Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore bond across the ectoplasmic divide is at once thrilling and moving (true love, it seems, knows no restrictions, from either physics or the spirit world). The film turned the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” into a retro smash, but only because of how it tapped the film’s emotions: intimate, operatic, quavering with devotion. — OG
It all began with a little piece of grit in her eye. Fortunately — or not — for Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), a doctor was present to remove the offending particle, and when her vision cleared, there he stood, Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), handsome and kind. The train station where this meeting happens serves as a kind of romantic purgatory, with each locomotive that steams through reminding Laura and Alec of their obligations to their actual partners. But every Thursday, they meet in town, too weak to resist the growing love between them — feelings which the conservative forces of the time could not condone, but which spoke to a human experience too widespread to go ignored. And so David Lean’s slender, achingly honest film has stood for years, staunchly refusing to judge two would-be adulterous souls, letting audiences in on a secret that even their spouses don’t suspect. — PD
It’s a seesawing Hollywood love story that’s been told on the big screen close to half a dozen times, yet never more powerfully or artfully than by Bradley Cooper in his astonishing directorial debut. From the bombastic kitsch of the 1976 Streisand/Kristofferson version, Cooper borrowed the idea of turning the central character into a rock ‘n’ roll star, and his performance as Jackson Maine — a half-deaf drunken burnout, running on fumes, even though he’s able to fool the world into thinking he’s still a rock god — grounds the soap-opera story in something disarmingly earthy and real. When Jackson meets Ally (Lady Gaga), a budding singer-songwriter, and invites her onstage to sing “Shallow,” you will get chills the way few romantic movies have given them to you — and the tremors don’t let up, as the two get on a serpentine roller-coaster of love vs. jealousy, arena rock vs. dance pop, and tragedy slipping into redemption. — OG
Baz Luhrmann’s visionary jukebox musical is in love with a lot of things: the look and feel of faux 1890s sound-stage Paris (that nightclub windmill etched in light), the epiphany of pop songs like Elton John’s “Your Song” when they pop up in what should be the wrong place (but then why does it feel so right?). Mostly, though, the film is in love with Christian and Satine, the romantic bohemians played by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, who summon gazes of such doomed longing that the film’s ultimate love affair seems to be with love itself — the unearthly kind, the kind that lives as an impossible dream. — OG
From “The Awful Truth” to “An Affair to Remember,” Cary Grant enjoyed a two-decade run as Hollywood’s most dapper leading man, romancing everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Ingrid Bergman, sometimes multiple times over. But it was paired with impossibly elegant star (and future princess) Grace Kelly that Grant sparkled brightest, playing a notorious jewel thief who finds Kelly’s wealthy American tourist even more irresistible than her invaluable diamond necklace. Like a well-practiced cat burglar, this sprightly Hitchcock movie tiptoes so lightly it hardly touches the ground, sweeping audiences away to the chicest of locations on the French Riviera. Whether it’s the scene of Kelly’s gems outdazzling a fireworks show (she stands in the shadow while her diamonds glisten in full view of Grant) or the hilltop picnic overlooking Monaco, the vibrant full-color fling gave landlocked Americans a fizzy Mediterranean fantasy featuring the most distinguished couple imaginable. — PD
The swooniest romantic movie of its time, and also the most sublime, James Cameron’s ocean disaster epic is the rare Hollywood blockbuster that achieves a larger-than-life quality. Yet its secret weapon as a love story is the too-often-unacknowledged deftness of its storytelling. As Jack and Rose, the sweethearts from opposite sides of the class divide, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have an effervescent chemistry, yet they’re playing starry-eyed youths caught in a puppy-love fling. The implication is that their union might last just about as long as the Titanic’s voyage — were it not for that fateful iceberg. In “Titanic,” it’s disaster itself that elevates love into something timeless. — OG
It was often said that in the 20th century, the movies taught people how to fall in love. You certainly know that watching “Casablanca.” In all of cinema, there is no love connection more pure, more impassioned, more haunted by the past, more alive in the present, more complicated by circumstance than the one between Rick (Humphrey Bogart), the expatriate owner of a shady Moroccan nightclub and gambling den, and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), the woman he fell in love with in Paris in 1940, only to be abandoned by her for mysterious reasons. Do they still love each other? The answer to that is as simple as listening to Sam (Dooley Wilson), the saloon pianist, play “As Time Goes By” and hearing that it’s really about how a kiss is just a kiss…for all time. Yet if Michael Curtiz’s ageless Hollywood classic celebrates what love is, it’s also about the deepest level of what love means: not just rapture but sacrifice, devotion to the other, a giving over of oneself to something larger. “Casablanca” remains the ultimate big-screen romance, in part because Bogart and Bergman show us that love is a force within us powerful enough to connect to — and save — the world. — OG | |||||
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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.
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5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 61 | https://scalar.lehigh.edu/toni-morrison/the-bluest-eye-and-imitation-of-life-1934-variations-on-a-theme | en | "The Bluest Eye" and "Imitation of Life" (1934): Variations on a Theme (Maggie Tarmey) | [] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | Contextual essay on the links between "The Bluest Eye" and the film adaptation of "Imitation of Life" (1934) | en | Toni Morrison: A Teaching and Learning Resource Collection | https://scalar.lehigh.edu/toni-morrison/the-bluest-eye-and-imitation-of-life-1934-variations-on-a-theme | Toni Morrison: A Teaching and Learning Resource Collection Main Menu Overviews of Toni Morrison's Fiction Overviews of Toni Morrison's Eleven published novels Overviews of Toni Morrison's Nonfiction and Drama Reception Histories Reception Histories: Toni Morrison's fiction Toni Morrison: Critical Overviews Toni Morrison: Biographical Note Biographical Overview of Toni Morrison's Life and Career Who Gets to be the 'Great American Writer'? Toni Morrison and Oprah's Book Club Maps and Data A Path Pointing to Maps and Data Related to Toni Morrison's Writings Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
"The Bluest Eye" and "Imitation of Life" (1934): Variations on a Theme (Maggie Tarmey)
1 2021-05-29T12:51:02-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 203 2 Contextual essay on the links between "The Bluest Eye" and the film adaptation of "Imitation of Life" (1934) plain 2021-06-08T15:28:34-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1
The following essay is written by student Maggie Tarmey, with edits by Amardeep Singh.
While the two appear quite different from one another, Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye and the 1934 film adaptation of Imitation of Life (directed by John Stahl and adapted from Fannie Hurst's 1933 novel of the same name) share many similarities. The Bluest Eye follows a young, dark-skinned Black girl in a small Ohio town in 1940. This girl, named Pecola Breedlove, wants to have blue eyes. It is her number one desire, and she believes that blue eyes, and only blue eyes, will make her beautiful. In contrast, Imitation of Life follows the story of a white widow, Bea, and her Black domestic servant, Delilah, as they start a business selling Delilah’s famous pancakes. Delilah has a daughter named Peola who is so light skinned that she passes for white. Peola struggles throughout the film with her identity. While these sound like two entirely different stories, they are really not so different. I would argue that these two works similar stories from rather different perspectives. The Bluest Eye tells the story of young girls struggling with colorism and white supremacy from a Black cultural perspective with a Black audience in mind, while Imitation of Life puts forward a sanitized, far less nuanced version of a similar narrative, one that is authored by white creators (Hurst and Stahl) and targeted to predominantly white audiences.
While Imitation of Life, at least the 1934 film adaptation of the story, has been largely forgotten today in favor of acclaimed director Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film adaptation, it had a large impact on Black audiences and Black communities at the time. This can be seen in author Zora Neale Hurston’s “Glossary of Harlem Slang,” which she published in 1942, less than ten years after both the original novel and first film adaptation was released. The word “peola,” (uncapitalized) appears in the glossary, and is defined as “a very white Negro girl” (Caputi 700). Another term that appears in the glossary is “pancake,” which is defined as “a humble type of Negro” (Caputi 702). In the original novel that Imitation of Life is based on, Delilah produces waffles, not pancakes. However, when the first film adaptation was released one year later, the original waffles were changed to pancakes. It is believed that this was an intentional move to invoke the alternate meaning of “pancake,” as Delilah’s character could be described as one. The racist imagery of the “Aunt Jemima” character had become popular starting in the late 19th century, and the shift to pancakes from waffles could also be an attempt to invoke that imagery and to have that character associated with Delilah (Caputi 702). This kind of racism on the silver screen was far from uncommon. Louise Beavers, the actress who portrayed Delilah, received much critical acclaim for her performance. Yet, she did not receive an Oscar nomination for her performance. This upset many people, and columnist Jimmy Fiddler wrote:
I also lament the fact that the motion picture industry has not set aside racial prejudice in naming actresses. I don't see how it is possible to overlook the magnificent portrayal of the Negro actress, Louise Beavers, who played the mother in Imitation of Life. If the industry chooses to ignore Miss Beavers' performance, please let this reporter, born and bred in the South, tender a special award of praise to Louise Beavers for the finest performance of 1934. (Stafford)
The film industry at this time was not many years removed from regularly having white actors in blackface in films. At this time, a Black film star had never been nominated for an Oscar award, and even though many thought that Louise Beavers deserved a nomination, she would not go on to be the first. That would instead go to actress Hattie McDaniel, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as “Mammy” in the 1939 film adaptation of Gone with the Wind. She would go on to win that award, but it would take fifty years before a Black actress would win another Oscar for her performance
.
In the 1930s, some of the most overt racism such as white actors in blackface were less prevalent than it had been in the earlier decades, but of course, racism on the screen persisted. In these mainstream Hollywood studio films in the 1930s, there were five categories of Black stereotypes and controlling images that characters played by Black actors fit into:
“The Black man colluding with white hegemony...known as the Uncle Tom”
“The Black woman colluding with white hegemony...known as the mammy”
“The ineffectual and lazy simpleton”
“A character of mixed race ancestry who was inevitably doomed...known as the ‘tragic mulatto’”
“The Black male as hypermasculine and dangerous” (Russell Sharman)
In Hollywood studio films, you would be hard-pressed to find a Black actor portraying a character that did not fall into one of these harmful stereotypes, and 1934’s Imitation of Life was no exception.
Two of these controlling images that appear in Imitation of Life are of the mammy figure and the tragic mulatto figure. The mammy figure, which Delilah’s character represents, is most simply described as “the faithful, obedient domestic servant” (Collins 80). The mammy image was originally created to justify the exploitation of Black women as house slaves, and later as domestic servants for white families. The controlling image of the mammy showcases the “ideal” relationship between white people and Black women: one of dominance by the white people and subservience by the Black women. This power dynamic shows that “even though she may be well loved and may wield considerable authority in her White ‘family,’ the mammy still knows her ‘place’ as an obedient servant. She has accepted her subordination” (Collins 80). This line by Collins is so powerful in part because it showcases the white family’s desire for complete dominance and control over their Black women domestic workers. An important note is that “mammy” also appears in Hurston’s “Glossary of Harlem Slang.” It is defined there as “a term of insult, never used in any other way by Negros” (Caputi 704).
There are two particular moments in the film where this power dynamic becomes clear. Perhaps the most obvious moment falls at the 54 minute mark in Imitation of Life. After a large party in the mansion owned by Bea and Delilah, the two women are relaxing in the living room. Bea and Delilah sit next to each other on a couch, and Bea removes her high heeled shoes after the long night. In response, Delilah encourages Bea to put her feet in her lap so that she can rub and massage them, to make Bea feel better. Now, on the very surface, this may not appear like much--especially since Delilah initiated and encouraged the foot massage, without expecting (or getting) anything in return. However, this is a prime example of how the controlling image of the mammy figure portrays the ideal relationship between white people and Black women. Not only does Delilah behave in a subservient way to Bea, her white counterpart, but she actually initiates this submissive behavior. This is such an ideal relationship in the eyes of white individuals because not only does Delilah accept her subordination as a Black woman, but she encourages it as well.
The second moment falls shortly after the first, and is at the 58 minute mark in the film. From the white gaze the film was created in, white audiences would view Bea and Delilah as relatively equal. They were business associates, lived in the same home, and got wealthy together, as a team. However, even once the two have become incredibly wealthy from the pancake business, the exploitation of Delilah is still apparent. At the 58 minute mark in the film, Bea and Delilah are having a conversation in what appears to be the lobby of their home (on the main floor), and both characters say that they will be going off to bed. Instead of a cut, the camera remains still as the two women walk to their respective bedrooms. In this still, Bea is shown walking up the stairs, but Delilah is shown walking down the stairs. Since their conversation appears to have taken place on the main floor, the first floor, it seems as if Delilah’s living space is in the basement of their large home, while Bea’s living space is upstairs. While nothing is said, and the only sounds are of the women’s footsteps, it is evident that this brief moment indicates that even if the two women appear to be partners, Bea is the white superior and Delilah can only ever be relegated to the well loved, but ever subordinate, mammy figure.
The controlling image of the tragic mulatto figure also appears in Imitation of Life, represented by Peola’s character. Jane Caputi cites Judith Berzon’s definition of the tragic mulatto, which reads:
This figure is usually a product of the white man’s imagination and often expresses his deepest (usually unspoken) fantasies about the largest marginal group in our society: specifically, his assumption that the mixed blood yearns to be white and is doomed to unhappiness and despair because of this impossible dream...While Black novelists have employed the stereotype in order to gain sympathy from white readers for their ‘black’ characters, the tragic mulatto character is much more likely to appear in white-authored mulatto fiction. (Caputi 707)
With the original novel version of Imitation of Life having been written by a white woman author, and then the 1934 film version being directed by a white man, this analysis of the tragic mulatto figure checks out. This is a white perspective of what life must be like for mixed race individuals, because the assumption is that no one would ever want to be Black, only white. Caputi also writes that the writings about the tragic mulatto characters “depicts a ‘civil war’ waging in the mind and body of the mulatta between her Black (savage, sexual) blood and her white (intelligent, refined, beautiful) blood” (Caputi 707). Peola’s character development and struggles are centered around this internal conflict that she holds, where she struggles to establish her own personal identity.
At the 26 minute mark in the film, there is a powerful scene that portrays Peola as the tragic mulatto figure. At this time in the film, Peola and Jessie are both quite young, and around elementary school-aged. The dialogue from this scene reads as follows:
Peola: I’m not Black, I’m not Black, I won’t be Black! She called me Black, Jessie called me that!
Delilah: You might as well learn to take it.
Bea: You go on and apologize to Peola right this minute!
Delilah: No, no, no Miss Bea. Don’t make her apologize. There ain’t no good in that.
Peola: You! It’s because you’re Black! You made me Black! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t be Black!
Bea: Jessie, how could you say such a cruel, mean thing to Peola?
Jessie: I didn’t mean anything.
Delilah: Oh, it ain’t her fault Miss Bea. And it ain’t yours and it ain’t mine. I don’t know rightly where the blame lies. It can’t be all the Lord’s. It’s got me puzzled.
The scene then fades to black after Delilah’s final line. This scene shows how even at a very young age, that Peola is acutely aware of her racial identity and what it means to be Black in the United States. Something that is also fascinating about this scene is Bea’s insistence that Jessie apologizes to Peola for calling her Black. Peola is Black: Delilah, her mother, is clearly Black, and Delilah mentioned earlier in the film how Peola’s father was Black as well, albeit very light-skinned. Bea is positively horrified that Jessie, a young child, would refer to Peola’s racial identity at all, and instead treats it as if it is a shameful thing. If the audience did not know that Jessie had called Peola “Black,” her reaction makes it appear as if Jessie called her a slur. Bea, a white woman, associates Blackness with shame and as if it is something very bad, which Peola has clearly already internalized at her very young age. Delilah’s final line in this scene is the most telling of all, when she says “I don’t know rightly where the blame lies.” Not only does Bea, a white woman, see Blackness as something wrong and shameful, but when Delilah talks about searching for who to “blame” for the mere existence of their Blackness, she too makes it sound like a death sentence. How else is Peola supposed to feel if even her own Black mother appears to find Blackness to be something terrible? This scene encapsulates Peola as an example of a tragic mulatto figure.
Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye tackles similar topics to Imitation of Life, but from a different perspective. This novel is set between 1940-1941, not long after the release of the film. The young girls in the novel are also of elementary school age, just like Peola was in the previously referenced scene. One of the young girls is named Maureen Peal, who is described as “a high yellow dream child with...sloe green eyes, something summery in her complexion” (Morrison 62). “High yellow” is a term that is often used to describe light-skinned Black people. She was also described as having “enchanted the entire school” (Morrison 62), and that both white and Black children adored her. The other three young girls in the novel (Claudia, Freida, and Pecola) are described as being very dark skinned girls. Claudia and Freida are quite jealous of the attention that Maureen gets from everyone, and they “looked hard for flaws to restore our equilibrium” (Morrison 63). They recognize that they stand on unequal ground against Maureen, and that they had flaws that brought them down. These flaws, however, are not identified by the girls as character flaws. Instead, they searched for ways to bring down her appearance, and do things like imagine her with a dog tooth, or six fingers on each hand. At this young age, they have recognized that Maureen is treated like royalty for her looks, and because she fits into many traditionally white beauty standards, that they too should aspire towards a kind of whiteness.
Pecola Breedlove, another one of the young Black girls in The Bluest Eye, is described as having extremely dark skin. She is considered to be incredibly ugly by the other young children, and is relentlessly harassed because of it. Pecola struggles a great deal with her Blackness, and goes on a journey throughout the novel in an attempt to have her eyes become blue, a classic symbol of whiteness. On her way home from school one day, a group of Black boys surrounded her and kept shouting “Black e mo Black e mo ya daddy sleeps nekked” (Morrison 65) at her, and would not let her go. In this scene, Morrison breaks from the structure of the novel, and a narrator comments on the scene:
They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds--cooled--and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 65)
This one of the most moving and disturbing moment of the entire novel. So much of the pain felt by characters in The Bluest Eye comes from the thoughts and ideas in these four short sentences. While the novel is about Pecola’s story, internalized anti-Blackness within even some of the youngest children in the Black community is the larger story at stake. Pecola is merely representative of many young Black children struggling to exist in their own skin and to develop their own identity away from the ever-prevalent shadow of whiteness and white supremacy.
Shortly after this scene, Pecola meets Maureen for the first time. When Pecola introduces herself, the two have the following conversation:
“I just moved here. My name is Maureen Peal. What’s yours?”
“Pecola.”
“Pecola? Wasn’t that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?”
“I don’t know. What is that?”
“The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother cause she is black and ugly but then cries at the funeral. It was real sad. Everybody cries in it. Claudette Colbert too.”
“Oh.” Pecola’s voice was no more than a sigh.
“Anyway, her name was Pecola too. She was so pretty. When it comes back, I’m going to see it again. My mother has seen it four times.” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 67-68)
Based on Maureen’s brief comments on the film, she has taken the characterization of Peola as a tragic mulatto figure at face value. It also makes sense that Maureen would fail to understand the deeper meaning of the film, and Peola’s struggle not against her mother, but with the idea of Blackness, colorism, and self-identity. Maureen herself is a light-skinned Black girl, but she seems to read this film more like a white viewer than a Black viewer would. I would speculate that because she is treated by those around her as superior to others within the Black community, that perhaps she sees herself as more closely aligned with white communities than Black communities. The hints of anti-Blackness also appear in her descriptors of the characters: Delilah is “Black and ugly,” but light-skinned Peola is “so pretty.” Pecola recognizes this, with her soft and sad response to hearing “Black” associated with “ugly.” At such a young age, Maureen has already associated Blackness with ugliness and whiteness with beauty, much like the children who participated in the doll test.
Shortly after this conversation, there is a scene in The Bluest Eye that mimics the Imitation of Life scene where Jessie calls Peola “Black.” The four young girls are arguing, and Maureen says (about Pecola), “What do I care about her old Black daddy?” (Morrison 73). Claudia, defending Pecola, responds “Black? Who you calling black? You think you so cute!” (Morrison 73). Maureen then ran away from the other girls, and shouts at them “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!” (Morrison 73). Even though Maureen Peal is still a Black girl, just like Claudia, Freida, and Pecola, with this statement she has asserted her superiority over them because she appears “less Black” than they do. She insists that she is cute, and they are ugly. Not only are they ugly in her mind, but she thinks that they are ugly explicitly because of their Blackness.
This altercation left a strong impact on Claudia, the narrator of this chapter. She has an incredibly moving monologue about the situation:
We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last words. If she was cute--and if anything could be believed, she was--then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack?...And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 74)
This is such an astute observation for a young, elementary school-aged girl to make, and it is also deeply upsetting. Claudia recognized that even if she is nicer than Maureen, even if she is smarter than Maureen, that because of her Blackness, she will always be seen as lesser when compared to Maureen. She also recognizes that no matter what she does or tries to do, that she cannot change this. And yet, she is not angry at Maureen per se. This strikes one as an extraordinary and generous insight for a young girl to have: Claudia recognizes that white supremacy is the Enemy, not individuals like Maureen.
The abstract nature of the 'enemy' is an awareness that Peola in Imitation of Life does not come to until the very end of the film, when she is at her mother’s funeral. What Peola does recognize is that perceived whiteness has given her a leg up in life, so she does all that she can to pass for white, even if it means disowning her own mother. However, she does not recognize until the end of the film that Delilah, her mother, was not the enemy. She spends so much time lashing out at her mother because she is upset about her Blackness, and Delilah takes it without complaint. Peola fails to realize until it is too late that individuals are not the enemy, and that white supremacy is. Delilah recognizes this, and knows that her daughter, too, will learn it in time.
I believe that this is the key distinction between white and Black responses to Imitation of Life. White viewers, and those who consider themselves in close proximity to whiteness (such as Maureen) were far more likely to view this film as a problem with the individual: that Peola is upset with Delilah for her circumstances. However, Black viewers, those who cannot pass as white (such as Claudia, Freida, and Pecola), live these experiences every single day. These viewers would be more likely to recognize that it is not a problem with an individual, but instead it is a problem with white supremacy. The everyday, lived experiences of having to live with racism, in particular colorism, and anti-Blackness shapes a viewer’s relationship with the story of Peola and Delilah, because it is really not a story “about” Peola and Delilah. Instead, it is far more a story of Peola and systemic racism, and her journey to determine what race and identity means to her.
Even though The Bluest Eye and 1934’s Imitation of Life appear to be two entirely different stories, they are not so different at all. Both of these two different pieces of art tackle the subject of racism, colorism, and white supremacy, just from two very different perspectives. I believe that the characters in The Bluest Eye, particularly Claudia who is so mature, have benefitted and developed that greater sense of understanding because they live in a Black community, surrounded by many other people who live the same struggles that they do. In contrast, Peola lives in a predominantly white community, and the only Black person that we see her interact with is her mother. I wonder if perhaps Peola would have developed a similar level of consciousness and understanding like Claudia has if she lived in a similar community to the girls in The Bluest Eye.
Works Cited
Caputi, Jane. “ ‘Specifying’ Fannie Hurst: Langston Hughes's ‘Limitations of Life,’ Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God, and Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye as ‘Answers’ to Hurst's Imitation of Life." Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 24. No. 4. St. Louis University, 1990.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2002.
Imitation of Life. Directed by John M. Stahl, Universal Pictures, 1934.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage Books, 1970.
Sharman, Russell Leigh. Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema. University of Arkansas, 2020.
Stafford, Jeff. “Imitation of Life (1934).” Turner Classic Movies, https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/79028/imitation-of-life#articles-reviews?articleId=84059.
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] | null | [] | null | See the President's daily schedule, explore behind-the-scenes photos from inside the White House, and find out all the ways you can engage with the most interactive administration in our country's history. | en | /sites/default/themes/framedynamic/favicon.ico | The White House | https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/node/311241 | Ana Roqué de Duprey was born in Puerto Rico in 1853. She started a school in her home at age 13 and wrote a geography textbook for her students, which was later adopted by the Department of Education of Puerto Rico. Roqué had a passion for astronomy and education, founding several girls-only schools as well as the College of Mayagüez, which later became the Mayagüez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico. Roqué wrote the Botany of the Antilles, the most comprehensive study of flora in the Caribbean at the beginning of the 20th century, and was also instrumental in the fight for the Puerto Rican woman’s right to vote.
With commentary from Frances A. Colón, Deputy Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State, United States Department of State. Source: General Archives of Puerto Rico
Ana Roque de Duprey nació en Puerto Rico en el año 1853. A los 13 años de edad comenzó una escuela en su casa y escribió un libro de geografía para sus estudiantes, que posteriormente fue adoptado por el Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico. Roqué sostenía una gran pasión por la astronomía y la educación, eventualmente fundo varias escuelas para mujeres, así como el Colegio de Mayagüez, que más tarde se convirtió en el Recinto de Mayagüez de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Roqué escribió la Botánica Antillana, el estudio más completo de la flora en el Caribe a principios del siglo 20, y también tuvo un papel decisivo en la lucha de la mujer puertorriqueña por el derecho a votar.
With commentary from Frances A. Colón, Deputy Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State, United States Department of State. Source: General Archives of Puerto Rico
Lillian Moller Gilbreth was an American psychologist and industrial engineer at the turn of the 20th century. She was an expert in efficiency and organizational psychology, the principles of which she applied not only as a management consultant for major corporations, but also to her household of twelve children, as chronicled in the book Cheaper by the Dozen. Her long list of firsts includes first female commencement speaker at the University of California, first female engineering professor at Purdue, and first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
With commentary from Amy S. Hess, Executive Assistant Director, Science and Technology Branch, Federal Bureau of Investigation | Source: Wikipedia
Ruth Rogan Benerito was an American chemist and pioneer in bioproducts. Benerito is credited with saving the cotton industry in post-WWII America through her discovery of a process to produce wrinkle-free, stain-free, and flame-resistant cotton fabrics. In addition to this work, Benerito also developed a method to harvest fats from seeds for use in intravenous feeding of medical patients. This system became the foundation for the system we use today. After retiring from the USDA and teaching university courses for an additional eleven years, Benerito received the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award both for her contributions to the textile industry and her commitment to education.
With commentary from Dr. Catherine Woteki, Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics, United States Department of Agriculture Source: ARS.USDA.gov
Edith Clarke was a pioneering electrical engineer at the turn of the 20th century. She worked as a “computer,” someone who performed difficult mathematical calculations before modern-day computers and calculators were invented. Clarke struggled to find work as a female engineer instead of the ‘usual’ jobs allowed for women of her time, but became the first professionally employed female electrical engineer in the United States in 1922. She paved the way for women in STEM and engineering and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.
With commentary from Michelle K. Lee, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Source: Wikipedia
Mollie Orshansky was a food economist and statistician whose work on poverty thresholds pioneered the way the U.S. Government defines poverty. By using the cost of the cheapest nutritionally adequate diet to calculate a cost of living expense for families of various sizes, Orshansky developed guidelines which eventually became the federal government’s official statistical definition of poverty. Her work provided a way to assess the impact of new policies on poor populations, which to this day remains a standard measure of new policies, demonstrating the enduring impact of her work on American public policy.
With commentary from Dr. Catherine Woteki, Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics, United States Department of Agriculture. Source: Social Security Administration History Archives
Mary Engle Pennington was an American chemist at the turn of the 20th century. At a time when few women attended college, Pennington completed her PhD and went on to work as a bacteriological chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Shortly after arriving at the USDA, Pennington became chief of the newly established Food Research Laboratory. During her 40-year career at the USDA, Pennington’s pioneering research on sanitary methods of processing, storing, and shipping food led to achievements such as the first standards for milk safety as well as universally accepted standards for the refrigeration of food products.
With commentary from Dr. Catherine Woteki, Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics, United States Department of Agriculture. Source: Wikipedia via Smithsonian Institution
In 1993, Dr. Ellen Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served on a nine-day mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery. She has flown in space four times, logging nearly 1,000 hours in orbit. Prior to her astronaut career, she was a research engineer and inventor, with three patents for optical systems. Ochoa is also the first Hispanic (and second female) to be named director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
With commentary from France A. Córdova, Director, National Science Foundation. Source: NASA
Isolating enriched uranium was one of the most difficult aspects of the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear bombs during World War II. Wartime labor shortages led the Tennessee Eastman Company to recruit young women, who were mostly recent high school graduates, to operate the calutrons that used electromagnetic separation to isolate uranium. Despite being kept in the dark on the specifics of the project, the “Calutron Girls” proved to be highly adept at operating the instruments and optimizing uranium production, achieving better rates for production than the male scientists they worked with.
With commentary from La Doris "Dot" Harris, Director, Office of Economic Impact and Diversity, U.S. Department of Energy. Source: DOE.GOV & LANL.GOV
Virginia H. Holsinger was an American chemist known for her research on dairy products and food security issues. Holsinger developed a nutritious and shelf-stable whey and soy drink mixture that is distributed internationally by food donation programs as a substitute for milk. She also created a grain blend that can be mixed with water to provide food for victims of famine, drought, and war. Additionally, her work on the lactase enzyme formed the basis for commercial products to make milk digestible by lactose-intolerant people. Through these discoveries, Holsinger’s work has had a major impact on worldwide public health.
With commentary from Catherine Woteki, Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics, United States Department of Agriculture. Source: ARS.USDA.gov
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was at the forefront of computer and programming language development from the 1930s through the 1980s. One of the crowning achievements of her 44-year career was the development of computer languages written in English, rather than mathematical notation — most notably, the common business computing language known as COBOL, which is still in use today. Hopper's legacy is still honored by the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference.
With commentary from U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith. Source: US Navy
Katherine Johnson, an African-American space scientist and mathematician, is a leading figure in American space history and has made enormous contributions to America’s aeronautics and space programs by her incorporation of computing tools. She played a huge role in calculating key trajectories in the Space Race -- calculating the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, as well as for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon. Johnson is now retired, and continues to encourage students to pursue careers in science and technology fields.
With commentary by NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan. Source: NASA
Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and environmentalist — whose groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, has been credited as the catalyst for the modern environmental movement. Carson passed away in 1964, but her work has been credited with the legacy of “awakening the concern of Americans for the environment.”
With commentary from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy. Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Department of the Interior)
Despite growing up as a self-described outcast, Maria Klawe pursed her passion for technology and became a prominent computer scientist. Klawe is now the first female president of Harvey Mudd College and works hard to ignite passion about STEM fields amongst diverse groups. During her tenure at Harvey Mudd College, her work has helped support the Computer Science faculty's ability to innovate, and has raised the percentage of women majoring in computer science from less than 15 percent to more than 40 percent today.
With commentary from U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith. Source: MAKERS
Lydia Villa-Komaroff is considered to be a trailblazer in the field of molecular biology. She faced many adversities she faced throughout her lifetime — at one point, an advisor told her that women did not belong in chemistry, fortuitously inspiring her to switch her major to biology — but she pursued her passion in spite of opposition. In 1978, Villa-Komaroff made waves with a published paper detailing her most notable discovery — that bacteria could be engineered to produce human insulin. She currently serves as the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Cytonome/ST.
With commentary from Jo Handelsman, Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Source: NIH and MAKERS
Ada Lovelace is considered to be the founder of scientific computing and the first computer programmer. Her algorithm — which history has come to know as the first one designed for a machine to carry out — was intended to be used for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which Lovelace would sadly not see built during her lifetime. Lovelace passed away in 1852, but her previously little-known work and "poetical" approach to science has broken through to inspire present-day young women interested in computer programming.
With commentary from U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith. Source: MAKERS and Google Blog
On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride transformed history when she became the first American woman to fly into space. After her second shuttle flight, Ride decided to retire from NASA and pursue her passion for education by inspiring young people. As a result, she founded Sally Ride Science, an organization dedicated to supporting students interested in STEM. Ride passed away in 2012, but her work continues to inspire young women across the country.
With commentary by NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan. Source: NASA
Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist and crystallographer, best known for her research that was essential to elucidating the structure of DNA. During her lifetime, Franklin was not credited for her key role, but years later she is recognized as providing a pivotal piece of the DNA story. Franklin spent the last five years of her life studying the structure of plant viruses and passed away in 1958.
With commentary from Jo Handelsman, Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine (NIH and HHS) | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 95 | https://www.ign.com/articles/best-movies-like-the-hunger-games | en | 10 Movies Like The Hunger Games to Watch After the Prequel | [
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"Connor Sheppard"
] | 2023-12-03T16:03:00+00:00 | Dark dystopian futures, young adult favorites, and more. | en | https://kraken.ignimgs.com/favicon.ico | IGN | https://www.ign.com/articles/best-movies-like-the-hunger-games | One of the most popular book-to-movie series in recent history, The Hunger Games hype is not over yet. Based on the 2020 novel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a new movie of the same title is now playing in theaters for all to enjoy. Acting as a prequel on the Hunger Games timeline, an increased depth into the history of the games is explored retroactively through the mind of the author, Suzanne Collins. While the film adaptation is sure to divert from the original novel in some ways, the spirit and adventure of the original movies will be maintained by director Francis Lawrence, who also directed the vast majority of the Hunger Games movies.
Excitement for this new film addition aside, one can only watch the original 4 movies so many times without needing a break and expanding ones movie scope. Thanks to the lineup of movies brought together below, any fan hungry for more movies like Hunger Games has multiple options to choose from.
Divergent (2014)
Easily the most closely related, Divergent carries an eerily similar tone and theme that any Hunger Games fan is likely to gravitate towards. Also based on a book series around the same era, Divergent follows a young girl who is marked as a problem when they discover she does not fit into any 5 virtue factions of their ‘perfect’ dystopian society. From the beginning of this film, it's easy to tell how similar this saga is in comparison to Hunger Games, with the evidence quickly piling up as the plot continues.
Battle Royale (2000)
A noticeably bloodier addition to this list, Battle Royale is a japanese action film that takes the base premise and runs with it. In a dystopian future Japan, a classroom of 9th graders are taken captive by the government and forced to fight to the death based on a law enacted after a revolution years prior. Promoted as one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite movies of the last 2 decades, even with a few honorable references in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, the level of violence and carnage is guaranteed to be much higher.
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)
Following the trend of battling teenagers and blooming romance, Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief is one of two movies that combines the aforementioned themes with Greek mythology. A struggling teenager named Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) discovers he is a descendant of a Greek God, kick-starting his new adventure and pitting him in the center of a long-time battle of the gods and their offspring. While the movies did not stay as true to the books as The Hunger Games did, the entertainment in this movie is still a familiar likeness to what is so great about the Hunger Games.
Although this film wasn’t received particularly well, there is a Percy Jackson series arriving on Disney Plus next month that looks promising.
Guns Akimbo (2019)
Diverging a bit from the usual path of teenage romance novels, Guns Akimbo focuses more on the fight to survive for others’ enjoyment. After talking a big game on an underground, online, gladiator-like community called Skizm, Miles (Daniel Radcliffe) is hunted down and forced into a life-or-death battle against trained killers that know his exact location at all times. While the theme of survival is present, this selection fits more into the sub-genre of dark humor with a sprinkling of romantic tension.
The Maze Runner (2014)
One of the most thematically similar movie options on this list, The Maze Runner is set in a dystopian future where teenagers are pitted against each other in a variety of ways. Awoken in an elevator with no memory of his past, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) finds himself amongst a group of young men trapped in a walled-off area and a giant, ominous maze as their only possible exit. While the plot seems to overall tiptoe the same line as the Hunger Games movies, there is an added element of mystery to this exciting trilogy.
Lord of the Flies (1963)
The film classic based on the 1954 William Golding novel of the same name, Lord of the Flies is such a pop culture staple that it likely inspired all of these films/stories to some degree. After their plane crashes and strands them on a remote, Pacific island, a group of young boys form their own savage tribes and begin to discover the darkest corners of human nature when faced with survival. Certainly veering off the path in terms of tone and modernity, Lord of the Flies is sure to satisfy that craving for on-screen, dramatic desperation.
The Tournament (2009)
For fans of Hunger Games that mostly enjoyed the gritty action sequences, The Tournament maintains a vaguely similar tone only more intense and more frequent. Trapped in a town where highly-trained, globally known assassins fight for an impressive cash prize, Father MacAvoy (Robert Carlyle) accidentally ingests one of the assassins’ trackers, unknowingly becoming a contestant in the competitive bloodbath. Likened moreso to Battle Royale (2000) or Guns Akimbo (2019), the high-octane, tournament-style action is really what this film does best.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
A selection from the iconic book-to-movie series that contains the most relevant plot details, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is right up the alley of any Hunger Games fan. After being suspiciously selected to participate in the potentially deadly Triwizard Tournament, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) must overcome multiple dangerous challenges against highly skilled witches and wizards. Interwoven with romance, adventure, friendship, and the occasional, necessary darkness, all boxes are checked and accounted for.
Check out our guide to the Harry Potter movie series for the rest of the films or dive into our picks for the best movies like Harry Potter.
Logan’s Run (1976)
One of the more thematically different movies on this list, Logan’s Run employs the fear of a dystopian rule that dictates the age one is most likely to be hunted down. In a dystopian future where civilians are willingly ‘re-incarnated’ in fire once they turn 30, enforcement officer Logan (Michael York) is tasked with hunting the ‘runners’ of society until he becomes one himself. While the effects are a bit dated and campy, there is a wealth of sci-fi theories and concepts that truly carry the narrative.
The Hunt (2020)
In what could be summarized as more of a Saw meets Squid Games movie, The Hunt is a dark, satirical action-thriller that is definitely not for younger viewers. Abducted by a group of disgustingly rich global billionaires, a group of random individuals realizes that they are being hunted for betting sport and decide to fight back. The main similarity that audiences will enjoy is the main character; an unexpectedly capable fighter who is determined to take down the existing, oppressive system.
Connor Sheppard is an Oregon-grown culture writer for IGN with previous work on The Manual. Intrigued from a young age by pop culture and movies, he has developed into an experienced critic and consumer of all things media. From his time earning a bachelor's degree in digital communications at Oregon State University, he found a love for writing and appreciating specific actors and directors in the many films he watches. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 36 | https://movies.disney.com/ | en | Disney Movies | [
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] | null | [] | null | Explore all our Disney Movies to find Disney+ originals, classic and new upcoming films, and even Blu-rays, DVDs and downloads. Plus, find movies to stream now on Disney+ or Hulu. | en | https://static-mh.content.disney.io/matterhorn/assets/favicon-94e3862e7fb9.ico | Disney Movies | https://movies.disney.com | Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley just as headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up. And it looks like she’s not alone. Maya Hawke lends her voice to Anxiety, alongside Amy Poehler as Joy, Phyllis Smith as Sadness, Lewis Black as Anger, Tony Hale as Fear, and Liza Lapira as Disgust. Directed by Kelsey Mann and produced by Mark Nielsen.
Daisy Ridley stars as the accomplished swimmer who was born to immigrant parents in New York City in 1905. Through the steadfast support of her older sister and supportive trainers, she overcame adversity and the animosity of a patriarchal society to rise through the ranks of the Olympic swimming team and complete the staggering achievement – a 21-mile trek from France to England.
“Moana 2” reunites Moana and Maui three years later for an expansive new voyage alongside a crew of unlikely seafarers. After receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors, Moana must journey to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters for an adventure unlike anything she’s ever faced. Directed by David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller, and produced by Christina Chen and Yvett Merino, “Moana 2” features music by Grammy® winners Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, Grammy nominee Opetaia Foaʻi, and three-time Grammy winner Mark Mancina.
“Mufasa: The Lion King” enlists Rafiki to relay the legend of Mufasa to young lion cub Kiara, daughter of Simba and Nala, with Timon and Pumbaa lending their signature schtick. Told in flashbacks, the story introduces Mufasa as an orphaned cub, lost and alone until he meets a sympathetic lion named Taka—the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of an extraordinary group of misfits searching for their destiny—their bonds will be tested as they work together to evade a threatening and deadly foe.
Marvel Studios' "Captain America: Brave New World" features Anthony Mackie as Captain America. The Falcon, played by Mackie in previous MCU films, officially took on the mantle of Captain America in the finale of "The Falcon and The Winter Soldier," on Disney+ in 2021. After meeting with newly elected U.S. President Thaddeus Ross, played by Harrison Ford in his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut, Sam finds himself in the middle of an international incident. He must discover the reason behind a nefarious global plot before the true mastermind has the entire world seeing red. "Captain America: Brave New World" stars Anthony Mackie, Danny Ramirez, Shira Haas, Xosha Roquemore, Carl Lumbly, with Giancarlo Esposito, Liv Tyler, Tim Blake Nelson, and Harrison Ford. The film is directed by Julius Onah and produced by Kevin Feige and Nate Moore. Louis D’Esposito and Charles Newirth serve as executive producers.
For centuries, people have called out to the universe looking for answers—in Disney and Pixar’s all-new movie “Elio,” the universe calls back! The original feature film introduces Elio, an underdog with an active imagination who finds himself inadvertently beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary organization with representatives from galaxies far and wide. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s ambassador to the rest of the universe, and completely unprepared for that kind of pressure, Elio must form new bonds with eccentric alien lifeforms, survive a series of formidable trials and somehow discover who he is truly meant to be. Directed by Adrian Molina (screenwriter and co-director of “Coco”) and produced by Mary Alice Drumm (associate producer of “Coco”), the film features the voices of America Ferrera as Elio’s mom, Olga; Jameela Jamil as Ambassador Questa; Brad Garrett as Ambassador Grigon; and Yonas Kibreab as the title character.
In “Wish,” Asha, a sharp-witted idealist, makes a wish so powerful that it is answered by a cosmic force—a little ball of boundless energy called Star. Together, Asha and Star confront a most formidable foe—the ruler of Rosas, King Magnifico—to save her community and prove that when the will of one courageous human connects with the magic of the stars, wondrous things can happen. Featuring the voices of Academy Award®-winning actor Ariana DeBose as Asha, Chris Pine as Magnifico, and Alan Tudyk as Asha’s favorite goat, Valentino, the film is helmed by Oscar®-winning director Chris Buck (“Frozen,” “Frozen 2”) and Fawn Veerasunthorn (“Raya and the Last Dragon”), produced by Peter Del Vecho (“Frozen,” “Frozen 2”) and Juan Pablo Reyes (“Encanto”). Jennifer Lee (“Frozen,” “Frozen 2”) executive produces—Lee and Allison Moore (“Night Sky,” “Manhunt”) are writers on the project. With original songs by Grammy®-nominated singer/songwriter Julia Michaels and Grammy-winning producer/songwriter/musician Benjamin Rice, plus score by composer Dave Metzger.
In Marvel Studios’ “The Marvels,” Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel has reclaimed her identity from the tyrannical Kree and taken revenge on the Supreme Intelligence. But unintended consequences see Carol shouldering the burden of a destabilized universe. When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, her powers become entangled with that of Jersey City super-fan Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel, and Carol’s estranged niece, now S.A.B.E.R. astronaut Captain Monica Rambeau. Together, this unlikely trio must team up and learn to work in concert to save the universe as “The Marvels.” The film stars Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Samuel L. Jackson, Zawe Ashton and Park Seo-joon. Nia DaCosta directs, and Kevin Feige is the producer. Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Mary Livanos and Matthew Jenkins serve as executive producers. The screenplay is by Megan McDonnell, Nia DaCosta, Elissa Karasik and Zeb Wells.
Harrison Ford returns to the role of the legendary hero archaeologist for this fifth installment of the iconic franchise. Starring along with Ford are Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”), Antonio Banderas (“Pain and Glory”), John Rhys-Davies (“Raiders of the Los Ark”), Shaunette Renee Wilson (“Black Panther”), Thomas Kretschmann (“Das Boot”), Toby Jones (“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”), Boyd Holbrook (“Logan”), Olivier Richters (“Black Widow”), Ethann Isidore (“Mortel”) and Mads Mikkelsen (“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore”). Directed by James Mangold (“Ford v Ferrari,” “Logan”), the film is produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Simon Emanuel, with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas serving as executive producers. John Williams, who has scored each Indy adventure since the original "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in 1981, is once again composing the score.
Disney and Pixar’s “Elemental” is an all-new, original feature film set in Element City, where fire-, water-, land- and air residents live together. The story introduces Ember, a tough, quick-witted and fiery young woman, whose friendship with a fun, sappy, go-with-the-flow guy named Wade challenges her beliefs about the world they live in.
"The Little Mermaid" is visionary filmmaker Rob Marshall’s live-action reimagining of Disney’s beloved animated musical classic, the story of Ariel, a beautiful and spirited young mermaid with a thirst for adventure. The youngest of King Triton’s daughters and the most defiant, Ariel longs to find out more about the world beyond the sea and, while visiting the surface, falls for the dashing Prince Eric. While mermaids are forbidden to interact with humans, Ariel must follow her heart. She makes a deal with the evil sea witch, Ursula, which gives her a chance to experience life on land but ultimately places her life – and her father’s crown – in jeopardy. “The Little Mermaid” is directed by Rob Marshall with a screenplay by David Magee, and is produced by Marc Platt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, John DeLuca and Rob Marshall. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 75 | https://www.thelawproject.com.au/insights/attractiveness-bias-in-the-legal-system | en | Physical Attractiveness Bias in the Legal System — The Law Project | http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5817bb2746c3c4a605334446/5817e1ff3e00be2eafd0dec4/58c757b5e4fcb5bd2d9613d5/1595920803956/Beautiful+Woman.jpg?format=1500w | http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5817bb2746c3c4a605334446/5817e1ff3e00be2eafd0dec4/58c757b5e4fcb5bd2d9613d5/1595920803956/Beautiful+Woman.jpg?format=1500w | [
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"Rod Hollier"
] | 2017-03-14T14:19:42+11:00 | [Download for PDF/printable version of this article] When I started looking into this subject, I predicted a person’s physical attractiveness would only have minor advantages. I was wrong. In fact, I was so wrong, that in one study, the effects of physical attractiveness on judges were so influ | en | https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5817bb2746c3c4a605334446/1543918645511-VAMJ5G4O5OLH62H3CGGE/favicon.ico?format=100w | The Law Project | https://www.thelawproject.com.au/insights/attractiveness-bias-in-the-legal-system | [Download for PDF/printable version of this article]
When I started looking into this subject, I predicted a person’s physical attractiveness would only have minor advantages. I was wrong.
In fact, I was so wrong, that in one study, the effects of physical attractiveness on judges were so influential, they fined unattractive criminals 304.88% higher than attractive criminals.
Surprising, I know.
Before we proceed, I want to address a few concerns of mine. Firstly, the information that you will read may cause some readers to feel unsettled. This is not my intention. Yes, it is disheartening. But the purpose of this article is to inform lawyers and other decision makers so that they can use the attractiveness bias to their advantage or to counter it.
A second concern of mine is that I don’t want to over-emphasise the attractiveness bias. Judges and jurors are affected by all kinds of cognitive distortions, such as emotive evidence, time of day, remorse of the defendant, socioeconomic status, race, gender, anchoring effect, and the contrast bias.
In the first section of this article, I give a ‘straight-to-the-point’ summary of the research conducted by 27 studies. Next, I enter into greater depth on the attractiveness bias and its effects on judges, jurors, and lawyers. Lastly, I provide research on the attractiveness bias in everyday life. Arguably, the last section is the most interesting.
Enjoy!
* * *
Key Takeaways
Physical Attractiveness had a significant influence on judges sentencing. The more unattractive the criminal, the higher the sentence. Or conversely, the more attractive the criminal, the lower the sentence. The results of three studies show a minimum increase of 119.25% and a maximum increase of 304.88%.
Attractiveness had little to no effect on a judge’s verdict of guilt. Attractive and unattractive criminals were convicted equally.
Mock jurors generally sentenced unattractive criminals significantly higher than attractive criminals. However, as jurors do not determine sentencing in real court cases, these results are not directly applicable.
Attractiveness had minor effects on mock juror’s verdicts. Some studies reported minor effects and some studies reported no effects.
Generally, attractive people are perceived as more intelligent, more socially skilled, more appealing personalities, more moral, more altruistic, more likely to succeed, more hirable as managers, and more competent. Attractive people tend to have better physical health, better mental health, better dating experiences, earn more money, obtain higher career positions, chosen for jobs more often, promoted more often, receive better job evaluations, and chosen as business partners more often, than unattractive people.
I believe that the attractiveness bias is rarely conscious. I do not think people are consciously disfavouring unattractive people. I also do not place moral blame on the typical person for their unconscious bias.
* * *
‘Attractiveness Bias’ in the Legal System
REAL JUDGES: SENTENCING
THE MISDEMEANOUR STUDY [1]
The first study we will observe is the research conducted by Downs and Lyons.
The purpose of this study was to find a link between a criminal’s attractiveness and sentencing outcomes.
They gathered a group of police officers and students to rate the attractiveness of over 2000 criminals. A scale of 1 - 5 was used and their ratings were mostly similar.
Then, the judges sentencing decisions were divided into two main categories: misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors were separated into to 3 classes, related to the severity of the crime.
The Results & Key Takeaways
For misdemeanours, the judges fined unattractive criminals significantly more than attractive criminals. The fine incrementally increased as the attractiveness decreased.
1. Minor Misdemeanours = +224.87%
2. Moderate Misdemeanours = +304.88%
3. Serious Misdemeanours = + 174.78%
The results are graphed below.
Weaknesses
All observers were white.
THE SECOND PENNSYLVANIAN STUDY [3]
This study was similar to the previous study. The researchers recorded data from real court cases in Pennsylvania. They detailed the physical attractiveness of 60 defendants and their neatness, cleanliness, and quality of clothing. Then, they recorded the judge’s decisions.
The criminals were charged with a range of felonies, including ‘murder; manslaughter; rape; kidnapping; armed robbery; aggravated assault; indecent assault; arson; burglary; conspiracy to sell/delver heroin, cocaine, hashish, and other elicit drugs; extortion; fraud; theft; and firearms violation.’
They were also a mix of white, Hispanic and black.
Results & Key Takeaways
The unattractive defendants were punished higher than the attractive defendants.
Weaknesses
The study did not give specific results. This is a major disappointment.
CONCLUSIONS
Unattractive criminals were punished higher than attractive criminals in three studies. The lowest increase was at 119.25% and the highest increase was at 304.88%.
REAL JUDGES: VERDICT, GUILTY OR NOT-GUILTY
There was no association between the defendant’s physical attractiveness and the judge’s verdict. Attractive and unattractive criminals were found guilty at equal rates. Zebrowitz and McDonald [4] also found that the plaintiff’s attractiveness had little to no effects on a judge’s verdict.
THE BABY-FACED STUDY [5]
The following study is not directly related to physical attractiveness but it is related to physical appearance.
Zebrowitz and McDonald measured the effects of defendants with a ‘baby-face’ and the judge’s verdict decisions. This is a strange characteristic to measure, however, the results were significant enough to warrant attention.
‘Baby-faced adults tend to have larger eyes, thinner, higher eyebrows, a large forehead and a small chin, and a curved rather than an angular face.’[6] A team of participants sat in 421 cases in ‘6 branches of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts small claims courts. 3 judges heard 51% of the cases and the remaining 49% of the cases were presided over by 22 additional judges.’ ‘62% of the plaintiffs and 78% of the defendants were male. 96% of both plaintiffs and defendants were white, and 81% were between the ages of 21 and 50.’
Results & Key Takeaways
The more baby-faced an adult was, the less likely he/she was found to be guilty for ‘intentional actions’ in civil claims. Observe the graph below.
Weaknesses
The researchers measured more items than simply attractiveness. This means that the 160 participants were not all measured on attractiveness. As they measured 8 different items and only two of them on attractiveness, I infer that the sample size consisted of 40 participants.
Jurors may be influenced by the mannerisms of criminals and victims. In this study, photographs were used, thus the jurors could not be influenced in that way.
MORE STUDIES
The attractiveness bias may affect civil cases also. Kulka and Kessler presented the participants with an audio-video showing an automobile negligence case. The mock jury consistently awarded fewer damages to the unattractive defendant.[9]
In Desantts and Kayson’s mock trial, the mock jurors were given a burglary scenario. The only changing factor was the attractiveness of the defendant. The unattractive defendant was given a higher sentence than the attractive defendant.[10] In another mock burglary trial, the jurors gave higher sentences to the unattractive defendant. However, in the swindle trial, higher sentences were given to the attractive defendant. It was hypothesised that the attractive defendant used her attractiveness in the swindle case, and the jurors held this with disapproval.[11] Smith and Hed found the same results. The unattractive burglar was sentenced higher but the attractive swindler was sentenced higher.[12]
CONCLUSIONS
It’s clear that mock jurors possess a bias against unattractive defendants.
For negligent homicide, robbery, burglary, and civil negligence, unattractive defendants were sentenced higher than attractive defendants.
For swindle cases, attractiveness bias seems to have the reverse effect.
However, jurors do not make sentencing decisions, thus, these results do not have direct application.
MOCK JURY: VERDICT, GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY
There is a clear distinction between what jurors believe to be ethical and what jurors actually decide. One study surveyed a series of mock jurors and found that 93% thought physical appearance should not be considered when evaluating guilt.[13] It’s reasonable to assume that jurors are not consciously associating physical attractiveness with guilt and sentencing.
THE META-ANALYSIS STUDY [14]
A meta-analysis examined 25 studies on the effects of physical attractiveness on mock jurors. They found Mock jurors find unattractive defendants guilty more often than attractive defendants. However, the results were not significant.
THE CANADIAN SEXUAL ASSAULT STUDY [15]
125 university students participated in this study. All students were white and Canadian.
The focus was to test the effects of white jury members perceptions of the physical attractiveness of white victims of rape. Were defendants found guilty more often when the plaintiff was attractive?
Participants read a four-page trial excerpt that included opening and closing statements from the Crown and Defence lawyers, and testimony from both the defendant and the victim. In the excerpt, it is specified that the victim and the defendant are colleagues, and the victim invited the defendant over to her home for dinner. Both the victim and the defendant agree that sexual intercourse occurred, but the victim alleged that the sexual intercourse was forced, whereas the defendant maintained that it was consensual.
Key Takeaways
Victim Attractiveness:
34.8% of men thought the defendant was guilty with an attractive victim and 52.3% of women thought the defendant was guilty with an attractive victim. Most men were not confident in their decision. Women were neutral in their confidence. This means, women were more likely to find a defendant guilty when the victim was attractive.
65.2% of men thought the defendant was guilty with an unattractive victim and 47.4% of women thought the defendant was guilty with unattractive victim. Most men were confident in their decision. Women were neutral in their confidence. This means men were slightly more likely to find the defendant guilty with an unattractive female victim.
Men seem to be influenced more by a female victim’s attractiveness than women. Women seem to be more consistent regardless of a female victim’s attractiveness.
Weaknesses
The mock jurors were university students and the average age was 20. The victim was always female and white.
MORE STUDIES
The attractiveness bias may affect civil cases also. Kulka and Kessler presented the participants with an audio-video showing an automobile negligence case. The mock jury consistently gave more guilty verdicts to unattractive defendants.[16]
CONCLUSIONS
Unattractive defendants are found guilty slightly more often than attractive defendants. However, these results are not significant. Many studies found no difference between attractive and unattractive defendants.
Men are more influenced by a female victim’s attractiveness in cases of sexual offenses. They are slightly more likely to decide in favour of the unattractive victim.
MOCK JURY: GENERAL PERCEPTIONS
Esses and Webster’s found that mock jurors perceived the unattractive defendant as significantly more dangerous.[17]
In Efran’s mock trial, he found that the jurors were more certain of the unattractive defendant’s guilt. When the attractive defendant was guilty, the jurors were less certain of their decision.[18]
Researchers found that when the victim was innocent and attractive, less evidence was needed to find the defendant guilty. Conversely, when the victim was unattractive, more evidence was needed to find the defendant guilty. However, when the victim was perceived to have contributed to the crime due to carelessness, attractiveness had no effect.[19]
In a rape mock jury trial, the attractive victim was more likely to be believed to be a victim of rape than the unattractive victim. The unattractive victim was less believed and even thought to have provoked the rapist.[20]
DEFEATING THE ATTRACTIVENESS BIAS
There are several factors that can offset the effects of the attractiveness bias.
THE SLOW THINKING STUDY [21]
The purpose of the study was to find out whether the attractiveness bias could be reduced by rational thinking.
124 female students were given a summary of a murder case. Half of the women were given a clear case of murder and the other were give a case of uncertainty, that is, it was hard to determine whether the defendant was guilty. The other factor that changed was the attractiveness of the defendant. One was unattractive and the other was attractive.
Results and Key Takeaways
The scenario where the criminal is clearly guilty, the women gave higher sentences to the unattractive criminal (24.71 years), than the attractive criminal (15.11 years). This amounts to a 63.53% increase. [See image below]
In the case where the criminal’s guilt is unclear, attractiveness had minimal effect on the sentencing amount. [See image below]
This study suggests that thinking slowly may help reduce the attractiveness bias. It seems that rapid thinking makes one susceptible to such psychological distortions. Even when the defendant is clearly guilty, slow thinking would be beneficial to reduce excessive sentencing.
The ‘real consequences’ group retained more of the case information than the ‘no consequences’ group. However, the interest between groups was equal.
MORE STUDIES
Mock jurors that deliberate are less likely to be influenced by the attractiveness bias. Thus, mock jurors that make their decision independently, are more likely to be influenced by the attractiveness bias.[23] However, another study found that deliberation exaggerated the effects of the attractive defendant.[24]
In one study, guilty defendants that smiled received lesser sentences than guilty defendants that did not smile.[25] Another study showed that defendants who displayed high levels of repentance and remorse received significantly lower sentences by mock jurors.[26]
A LAWYER’S PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS
IN COURT
I was unable to find any studies directly addressing the physical attractiveness of a court advocate.
However, the late David Ross, a QC from Melbourne Australia, believes the physical attractiveness of the advocate is neither a positive or a negative. He writes:
Good physique is not a necessity. Advocates are tall, short, fat, thin, good looking, plain. No doubt the good looking advocate has some attraction, but being well-favoured is probably the least of the qualities an advocate needs. An unhappy physique or unusual looks are never a handicap to one who has the necessary attributes.[27]
It must be noted that his belief was grounded in experience, not empirical research.
IN A LAW FIRM
I have found no journal articles on physical attractiveness and men in a law firm. Thus, the focus of this section will be on women.
Peggy Li examined the current scientific literature on the effects of physical attractiveness upon people’s perceptions.[28] Then, she made inferences on how this would affect women in the legal profession.
It is important to note that the author’s conclusions are predictions. Her article is not an empirical study itself. Nonetheless, the academic journal article was well researched.
Key Takeaways
Women that are searching for a job in the legal industry may have greater success if they’re physically attractive.
Women in the legal profession that are attractive may have more success than their unattractive peers as they are perceived in a more positive light. This is caused by a blend of many factors.
If a woman dresses ‘sexily’, she may be negatively perceived. Both men and women may perceive her as using her body to ‘get ahead.’
Weaknesses of the Article
The journal article itself is not an empirical study. Thus, Peggy Li is making an informed prediction.
All scientific literature that the author referenced are observations on white women. Women of other races may have different conclusions.
CAUSATION
I have been writing thus far as if physical attractiveness is causing the above results, rather than physical attractiveness just being correlated. This is in part misleading as scientific causation has not fully been established, or ever will be.
There are many explanations of the link between attractiveness and litigation outcomes. Here are a few:
The relationship of attractiveness to litigation processes may be of four basic types.
First, it may be that persons who are less attractive commit more serious crimes than those who are more attractive. This view suggests that unattractive people are more inclined toward crime, especially violent crime.
The second view is that criminal actions elicit differential perceptions of objective attractiveness, so that attractiveness estimates are modified by prior knowledge of the actions of the persons being judged.
Third, attractiveness and antisocial/criminal behaviors are tightly pleached, probably from an early age. Because their associations are routinely high, it is probable that the direction of effects between attractiveness and such behavior will remain unknown.
Finally, it may be possible that a third variable affects the relationship of attractiveness and criminal accusations/activities. Socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and developmental advantages (e.g., nutrition, schooling) might be such factors.[29]
And:
...the finding of a significant negative correlation between seriousness of crime and attractiveness could possibly suggest that unattractive persons are more likely to be suspected of criminal activity, and consequently charged with a serious crime, than are their more attractive counterparts. Contrariwise, one could argue that unattractive persons are more likely to engage in criminal activities because their lesser endowment in looks obviates legitimate means of value-access.[30]
However, the incremental changes of the correlation between attractiveness and sentencing[31] weighs heavily on the probability of a causal link (refer to ‘The Misdemeanour Study’ above).
The association between socioeconomic status and physical attractiveness is probably ruled-out for the following reasons. Firstly, one study found that the defendant’s clothing was not correlated to their physical attractiveness.[32] However, I hypothesise there would be exceptions in extreme circumstances such as homelessness. Secondly, many studies found no correlation between race and physical attraction, thus ruling out the race, socioeconomic status, and physical attraction association.
While causation is not known, I place my bet that physical attraction will have noteworthy effects on judicial outcomes.
* * *
The General Effects of the Attractiveness Bias
GENERAL PERCEPTIONS OF ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE
We seem to perceive attractive people more favourably than unattractive people on many measures.
We perceive attractive people as: more intelligent[33]; more socially skilled[34]; possessing more socially desirable qualities[35]; more appealing personalities[36]; more likely to generally succeed[37]; more altruistic[38]; and more moral[39]. Also, ‘people are more likely to give help to strangers who are dressed neatly and attractively.’[40]
The converse is also true, that is, unattractive people are perceived as less intelligent, less socially skilled and so on. Interestingly, the effects are heightened by the ‘contrast bias’. When an attractive person is directly compared to an unattractive person, the attractive person is seen as more attractive and the unattractive person is seen as less attractive.[41]
When a person comes into to contact with an attractive person, it triggers certain parts of the brain.
Activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex ("OFC"), the region of the brain associated with processing positive emotions, stimuli, and reward, increases as a function of both attractiveness and moral goodness ratings.[42]
ATTRACTIVENESS AND LIFE OUTCOMES
Not only are attractive people perceived more positively, they outperform unattractive people on several measures.
Attractive people outperform unattractive people on ‘occupational success, popularity, dating experience, sexual experience, and physical health’.[44] Studies have even found that attractive people have better mental health, both from subjective experience and on objective psychological measures. Lastly, attractive people tend to have higher career positions and earn more money.[45]
ATTRACTIVENESS AND CAREER SUCCESS
There are strong correlations between physical attractiveness and career success for both men and women. The attractiveness bias in the workforce is well and truly present.
Attractive people are perceived as: more hirable as managers[46] and more competent, however, this effect is stronger for males than for females.[47] Attractive people are hired more often, promoted more often, found more suitable, chosen as a business partner more often, and have better performance evaluations than unattractive people.[48]
Attractive people are chosen for employment more often even when the unattractive people have equal qualifications.[49] Studies have attempted to lessen this effect by presenting more information about the applicants, such as ‘relevant past work experience, relevant college major, interview transcripts, performance reviews’[50] etc. It’s hoped that this will offset the attraction effects. However, this is not supported. More information about the applicants did not ‘even the playing-field’.[51] It must be noted that this is only relevant when choosing between similar prospects. For example, a company would not hire a person with zero qualifications for a position that requires a Ph.D.
Professionals were affected by the attractiveness bias as much as university students.[52] The experience of the hiring manager did not lessen the effects.
There is a silver-lining here. The effects of the attractiveness bias are decreasing over time. The effects of attractiveness were stronger in studies conducted in the 1970’s and weaker in the studies conducted in the 1990’s. It must be noted, that the effects were clearly there in the 1990’s. Thus, while it’s reducing, it still exists.
Women and Physical Attractiveness
In a meta-analysis, the researchers evaluated all the major studies from 30 years of research related to physical attractiveness and job success. The evidence is clear, the ‘beauty is beastly’ effect is not supported.
The ‘beauty is beastly’ effect tries to argue that attractive women in stereotypically masculine jobs will be discriminated against because their attractive qualities emphasise their feminine qualities. These feminine qualities are seen not to ‘match’ the stereotypical masculine job. Thus, they believe that the masculine woman or the unattractive woman will be favoured. This is false.
Attractive women will be privileged, even in stereotypically masculine jobs. The author quotes, ‘thus, our results afford no support for the “beauty-is-beastly” perspective: Physical attractiveness is always an asset for individuals.’[53]
* * *
Visual Summary
The following infographic is a visual summary of this article.
References
[1] Natural Observations of the Links Between Attractiveness and Initial Legal Judgments (1991) by A. Chris Downs and Phillip M. Lyons
[2] Defendant's Attractiveness as a Factor in the Outcome of Criminal Trials: An Observational Study (1980) by John E. Stewart
[3] Appearance and Punishment: The Attraction-Leniency Effect in the Courtroom (1985) By John E. Stewart
[4] The Impact of Litigants' Baby-Facedness and Attractiveness on Adjudications in Small Claims Courts (1991) by Leslie A. Zebrowitz and Susan M. McDonald
[5] The Impact of Litigants' Baby-Facedness and Attractiveness on Adjudications in Small Claims Courts (1991) by Leslie A. Zebrowitz and Susan M. McDonald
[6] The Impact of Litigants' Baby-Facedness and Attractiveness on Adjudications in Small Claims Courts (1991) by Leslie A. Zebrowitz and Susan M. McDonald
[7] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness, Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Gender of Defendants and Victims on Judgments of Mock Jurors: A Meta-Analysis (1990) by Ronald Mazzella & Alan Feingold
[8] Defendants' Characteristics of Attractiveness, Race, And Sex and Sentencing Decisions (1997) by Andrea DeSantis & Wesley A. Kayson
[9] Is Justice Really Blind? - The Influence of Litigant Physical Attractiveness on Juridical Judgment (1978) by Richard A. Kulka and Joan B. Kessler
[10] Defendants' Characteristics of Attractiveness, Race, and Sex and Sentencing Decisions (1997) by Andrea Desantts, Wesley A. Kayson
[11] Beautiful but Dangerous: Effects of Offender Attractiveness and Nature of the Crime on Juridic Judgment (1975) by Harold Sigall & Nancy Ostrove
[12] Effects of Offenders' Age and Attractiveness on Sentencing by Mock Juries (1979) by Edward D. Smith & Anita Hed
[13] The Effect of Physical Appearance on the Judgment of Guilt, Interpersonal Attraction, and Severity of Recommended Punishment in a Simulated Jury Task (1974) by Michael G. Efran
[14] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness, Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Gender of Defendants and Victims on Judgments of Mock Jurors: A Meta-Analysis (1990) by Ronald Mazzella & Alan Feingold
[15] The Influence of Defendant Race and Victim Physical Attractiveness on Juror Decision-Making in A Sexual Assault Trial (2014) by Evelyn M. Maeder, Susan Yamamoto, & Paula Saliba
[16] Is Justice Really Blind? - The Influence of Litigant Physical Attractiveness on Juridical Judgment (1978) by Richard A. Kulka and Joan B. Kessler
[17] Physical Attractiveness, Dangerousness, and the Canadian Criminal Code (2006) by Victoria M. Esses & Christopher D. Webster
[18] The Effect of Physical Appearance on the Judgment of Guilt, Interpersonal Attraction, and Severity of Recommended Punishment in a Simulated Jury Task (1974) by Michael G. Efran
[19] Beautiful and Blameless: Effects of Victim Attractiveness and Responsibility on Mock Juror’s Verdicts (1978) by Norbert L. Kerr
[20] Rape and Physical Attractiveness: Assigning Responsibility to Victims (1977) Clive Seligman, Julie Brickman, & David Koulack.
[21] What is Beautiful is Innocent: The Effect of Defendant Physical Attractiveness and Strength of Evidence on Juror Decision-Making (2015) by Robert D. Lytle
[22] Guilty or Not Guilty? A Look at the "Simulated" Jury Paradigm (1977) by David W. Wilson and Edward Donnerstein
[23] Attractive But Guilty: Deliberation and the Physical Attractiveness Bias (2008) by Mark W. Patry
[24] The Emergence of Extralegal Bias During Jury Deliberation (1990) by ROBERT J. MacCOUN
[25] Attributions of Guilt and Punishment as Functions of Physical Attractiveness and Smiling (2005) M.H. Abel & H. Watters
[26] Communication and justice: Defendant Attributes and Their Effects on the Severity of His Sentence (1974) by Steven K. Jacobson & Charles R. Berger
[27] Advocacy by David Ross QC
[28] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[29] Natural Observations of the Links Between Attractiveness and Initial Legal Judgments (1991) by A. Chris Downs & Phillip M. Lyons
[30] Defendant's Attractiveness as a Factor in the Outcome of Criminal Trials: An Observational Study (1980) by John E. Stewart
[31] Natural Observations of the Links Between Attractiveness and Initial Legal Judgments (1991) by A. Chris Downs & Phillip M. Lyons
[32] The Impact of Litigants' Baby-Facedness and Attractiveness on Adjudications in Small Claims Courts (1991) by Leslie A. Zebrowitz and Susan M. McDonald
[33] The Attractive Executive: Effects of Sex of Business Associates on Attributions of Competence and Social Skills (1985) by Midge Wilson, Jennifer Crocker, Clifford E Brown, & Janet Konat
[34] The Attractive Executive: Effects of Sex of Business Associates on Attributions of Competence and Social Skills (1985) by Midge Wilson, Jennifer Crocker, Clifford E Brown, & Janet Konat
[35] The Attractive Executive: Effects of Sex of Business Associates on Attributions of Competence and Social Skills (1985) by Midge Wilson, Jennifer Crocker, Clifford E Brown, & Janet Konat
[36] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[37] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[38] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[39] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[40] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[41] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on Job-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies (2003) by Megumi Hosoda, Eugene F. Stone-Romero, Gwen Coats
[42] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[43] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[44] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on Job-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies (2003) by Megumi Hosoda, Eugene F. Stone-Romero, Gwen Coats
[45] The Impact of Physical Attractiveness on Achievement and Psychological Well-Being (1987) by Debra Umberson & Michael Hughes
[46] Physical Attractiveness and Femininity: Helpful or Hurtful for Female Attorneys (2015) by Peggy Li
[47] The Attractive Executive: Effects of Sex of Business Associates on Attributions of Competence and Social Skills (1985) by Midge Wilson, Jennifer Crocker, Clifford E Brown, & Janet Konat
[48] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on Job-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies (2003) by Megumi Hosoda, Eugene F. Stone-Romero, Gwen Coats
[49] Sexism and Beautism in Personnel Consultant Decision Making (1977) by Thomas Cash, Barry Gillen, & D. Steven Burns
[50] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on Job-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies (2003) by Megumi Hosoda, Eugene F. Stone-Romero, Gwen Coats
[51] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on Job-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies (2003) by Megumi Hosoda, Eugene F. Stone-Romero, Gwen Coats
[52] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on Job-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies (2003) by Megumi Hosoda, Eugene F. Stone-Romero, Gwen Coats
[53] The Effects of Physical Attractiveness on Job-Related Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies (2003) by Megumi Hosoda, Eugene F. Stone-Romero, Gwen Coats | ||
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"Tonya Mosley"
] | 2023-04-04T00:00:00 | Shields has had a long career as a model, and a Broadway film and television actor. A new two-part Hulu documentary looks at her childhood roles and the toxic culture that perpetuates misogyny. | en | NPR | https://www.npr.org/2023/04/04/1167944562/pretty-baby-chronicles-brooke-shields-career-and-the-sexualization-of-young-girl | TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Brooke Shields is the subject of a new documentary on Hulu called "Pretty Baby" that has already become part of the larger conversation about the sexualization of children and young women. Her career started as a baby in soap commercials and print ads. She went on to become an actress, famous in part for her beauty. One of her most notable and controversial roles was in the 1978 movie "Pretty Baby," in which, at the age of 12, she played a child prostitute. Brooke Shields talked about her life and career with our guest interviewer, Tonya Mosley, the host of the podcast Truth Be Told.
TONYA MOSLEY, BYLINE: There was a time when Brooke Shields was a household name, a cultural phenomenon. Even today, depending on how old you are, Shields doesn't need much of an introduction. Most often, her starring role in the 1980s film "Blue Lagoon" or her Calvin Klein ads are enough.
(SOUNDBITE OF AD)
BROOKE SHIELDS: You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.
MOSLEY: But as the new documentary "Pretty Baby" explores, Shields' early career was defined by a sexuality that both she and the world are still trying to understand. In this two-part series now on Hulu, director Lana Wilson peels back the layers of Shields' story, examining the toxic culture and power structure that perpetuates misogyny and objectifies young girls. Brooke Shields has had a long career as a model, a Broadway, film and television actor. She's authored several books and is the host of the podcast "Now What?"
Brooke Shields, welcome again to FRESH AIR.
SHIELDS: Oh, thank you very much for having me.
MOSLEY: Brooke, you started working at 11 months old. And, really, by the time you were a teenager, you were one of the most recognized children on the planet. How much awareness did you have about your fame?
SHIELDS: Because I never really knew life without it, it was just a part of my life being recognized. It started at such a young age that you just sort of - you never get really used to the feeling, but you get used to surveying an area, knowing when someone's going to approach. You sort of get this - this other sense becomes very incited. And so it wasn't about fame as much as it was just about recognition. And the minute you leave your apartment, you are in the world differently than many people are.
MOSLEY: In "Pretty Baby," you were portrayed as a child prostitute, but you describe it as truly the only artistic film you think you've ever been in, even to this day.
SHIELDS: Yeah, I really - I value it so much more. I mean, every single detail in that movie was - in "Pretty Baby" was purely thought out and of the actual time. The research that went into all the wardrobe and the - we had one of the best cinematographers in the world and - you know, so the caliber of talent on that set and really putting the film together was just unlike anything that I've ever experienced again.
MOSLEY: Of course, because of the depiction of a child prostitute and you being the age that you were, that's what made it so controversial for - at the time, in 1978. And it also was a time where you had your first onscreen kiss in the film. And I heard you say that it must have been harder, actually, for the adult male actor, Keith Carradine, than it was for you at the time. Did you even understand the weight of that kiss in the moment?
SHIELDS: No, I just was embarrassed that I didn't know how to do it. You know, I had never kissed a boy before, you know? So it was one of those things where, I mean, I'd had a crush on a little model that I had worked with, and that was it. I mean, at 11, I didn't know what I was doing. And so, you know, I kept scrunching up my face and I kept, like - you just don't know what to do. And it's funny because it's such a non-kiss, you know? And it was funny because Louis made us stay together sort of and not move.
MOSLEY: Louis Malle, the director, yes.
SHIELDS: Louis Malle, yes. Made us just stay together and he kept saying, don't pull apart. Don't pull away. Don't pull away. And I was just like, wow, really? Is this all it is, kissing? This is - OK. You know, when you're 11, too, you don't think of age difference. So, I mean, he was, I assume, much more aware but such a gentleman and so kind about it. You know, he didn't want to scar me.
MOSLEY: I read that he said to you, this doesn't count.
SHIELDS: Yeah. And it really - I thought it did. You know, you think so much about the first kiss, you know, what you're going to have. And you talk about it with your girlfriends. And, you know, it was funny. We would have those, like, parties where whenever I went to go visit my sisters, they would, you know, five seconds in the closet or 10 seconds in the closet. And every time I got in the closet, I went, don't even think about it.
MOSLEY: Don't even think about kissing me (laughter).
SHIELDS: Don't even think about it. I am certainly not going to have my first kiss in a closet in the dark while other people are waiting outside. I was like, the whole thing is just ridiculous and childish. And I found - I mean, I thought that way even when I was a kid, like, even younger. So this - that's what - I didn't want to ruin that. And he sensed that and, you know, had intuited that I had not kissed a boy before, you know. And so he knew that that's what I was struggling with and how he figured that out, I don't know. And it was one of the most generous gestures any actor has ever shown me and so kind and so in the moment and so sensitive that I never forgot it. And I've always been so thankful to him for that.
MOSLEY: You didn't feel exploited or unsafe on that set of "Pretty Baby." But there were instances in other films where you were coaxed in ways that kind of made you feel uncomfortable. There was this weird moment on the set of the 1981 movie "Endless Love" where the director, Franco Zeffirelli, was pinching your toes in order to get you - to get a certain reaction out of you.
SHIELDS: Yeah, he wanted some look of ecstasy or something on my face. And, you know, my first reaction was, how about directing? Here's an idea.
MOSLEY: You were thinking that even at the time.
SHIELDS: Yeah. Wouldn't you tell me - like, why - I had somebody once say - they had a coach on the set and I was - I think I was doing "Just You And Me, Kid" or something with George Burns. And he - the person said to me, OK, now you have to cry. So you have a horse, right? And I said, yes. And she said, so think about someone stabbing your horse. And I said, lady, look, if someone stabbed my horse, I would - the first thing I would do would not be cry. I would not cry. I would stab the person who stabbed my horse and then I would fix the horse. And then maybe I would cry. I said, that is the worst thing because I would have an instant look of anger and rage. And I don't think anger and rage is what the director is looking for. I think he's looking for sad.
And I just thought, God, can't people come up with something a little more relatable and a bit more nuanced, you know, to talk you through something and give you an image rather than an image that's going to possibly produce the antithesis of what is needed? I mean, I'm a very thoughtful kid who has a very good imagination, who is very emotive and, you could have come up with just a little bit - you should have spent a little more time with me, taking me aside and sort of guiding me through it, you know. The boys in those films were always so much more of a focal point because they were considered newcomers, you know? And they were both older, like...
MOSLEY: Your male co-stars. Yeah.
SHIELDS: ...All my leading men were older. All my male co-stars were always older. And, you know, they should have been spending more time - you know, I know that in Louis Malle's case, there was this - he didn't want me schooled. He didn't want me thinking of things. He really did just want to see me react in situations. And so that was very different. It was a very different film. But when it actually came to sort of practicality, directors weren't - didn't spend any time with me, you know? So I just - you know, the assumption is I look a certain way, so that's enough. And I'm box office, so that's enough.
MOSLEY: Yeah. How do you reconcile that? Are you angry about it today? Because just knowing what I know about you, you take your craft seriously. Do you think he would have gotten a better performance - they would have gotten a better performance out of you?
SHIELDS: I think they would have gotten a better performance. I think there's a sort of thinness to a lot of my earlier - not "Pretty Baby." I don't know how Louis Malle ended up - but he would talk in stories, and he would just say stories, and he would get you to think of things. But he didn't - he - you know, it was very, very different. You know, I don't - it's not anger. It's just sort of missed-opportunity feelings. You know, I think a lot of the movies I made could have been better.
But then again, you know, I'd also have to say that it didn't matter because I wanted to be liked more than I was worried about really delivering a master performance. Plus, I wanted to really ensure that there was no crossover into my own life. So I made faces, and I had - like, the minute the scene would be over, I would stick my tongue out, or I would just constantly break character because I didn't want to - I wanted to remain my personal self at the same time. And, you know, that was a form of self-protection and preservation.
MOSLEY: That is really interesting, the two things you said there. One is you wanted to be liked. I think that's something that a lot of women and young girls can understand. You go along with things because you want to be liked.
SHIELDS: Absolutely.
MOSLEY: But it also sounds like you had a sense of yourself, a really strong sense of yourself, as a young child wanting to make certain that you kept those parts of yourself that weren't a part of show business. Where did that come from?
SHIELDS: You know, I think any - there was a lot of uncertainty and the unexpected in the way my mother and I lived our life. You know, at the drop of a hat, you were at a different location. Or, you know, she would be sober one minute, drunk the next. And so there was this sort of - there was always a sense of what's going to happen next? And I think that going on to a movie set, the structure of it and the mechanics of it were so comforting to me because they were so predictable, and you could learn them, and you had a routine, and you had a call sheet, and you had rules, and you had lunchtime, and you had all of these different things that I just loved. And I think that losing myself in a character was scary to me because I was afraid I wouldn't have any ground to go back to.
So I kept disassociating from all of it. You know, I just compartmentalized. And - you know, and I think that was just my way of keeping steady. And I don't know how I knew that. I think it was instinctual. And I also think it has a lot to do with being a child of an alcoholic. You know, you get very, very controlling in what you can control because there's so much you can't control. And as a child, you know, you need to keep your loved one alive, and so it takes such precedence over everything that I - you know, I became, like, a neat freak and kind of OCD and really organized. And I kept my environment very controlled, you know?
MOSLEY: I want to talk more about your mother a little bit later. Let's take a moment for a break. We're talking to Brooke Shields, subject of a new documentary on Hulu titled "Pretty Baby," which gives a long view of Shield's career as an '80s icon. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE ACORN'S "LOW GRAVITY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and I'm Tonya Mosley. And if you're just joining us, I'm talking with Brooke Shields, Broadway, film and television actor. She's the author of several books and the host of "Now What?" - a podcast. We're talking about the documentary on Hulu called "Pretty Baby," which brings a fuller view of when Shields came of age in public.
I really am struck by this mechanism you used to protect yourself, to disassociate. I actually feel like I noticed it in some of those early interviews when these male journalists would be asking you really borderline or suggestive questions. You seemed aloof, almost unfazed. I want to play a clip of you being interviewed around the time of "Pretty Baby." Let's take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MIKE DOUGLAS: How do you feel about all this fuss that's being made over you?
SHIELDS: I think it's kind of fun.
DOUGLAS: Do you?
SHIELDS: Yeah.
DOUGLAS: You're enjoying it?
SHIELDS: Oh, yeah. I love it.
DOUGLAS: You really are an exquisite-looking young lady. I know you've been told that. But isn't she a pretty girl?
(APPLAUSE)
MOSLEY: That was the interviewer Mike Douglas interviewing you back in the 1970s. And it feels so uncomfortable to listen to this. What goes through your mind when you look back at these kinds of interactions?
SHIELDS: After "Pretty Baby," there was such a firestorm. You know, it was as if - 'cause I was away in Europe when the film won the Palme d'Or in Cannes. And when we came back to America, you know, Cannes - everything in France was celebrating us. And then we come back to America, and it's just pitchforks and protests. And they were just - there were so much that I just shut down to all of it. And, you know, you just sit there in these interviews, and you're just like, ugh, here we go again. They're going to just - they're going to say the same thing, ask the same question.
I always used to say, God, I wonder, Mom, if I were to play a murderer, would they - you know, would they be really worried that I was uncomfortable stabbing somebody and, you know, killing somebody and the blood? And, you know, it's just - you know, I was more traumatized by my first movie where I was 9, and I had to get this prosthetic makeup on my face to look like I had been burned. It was a murder mystery. And I hadn't seen the makeup. And then I looked in the mirror, and I looked like, you know, I had a big slice of pizza on my face. And I thought it was going to be, like, charcoal, like, you know, a chimney sweep, because I had seen "Mary Poppins," you know? And all of a sudden, I had this - I was terrified. I looked in the mirror. And it's so interesting to me that, you know, people never had a problem with me playing that character. Or they never - and I understand because sexuality is just such a trigger for especially the press. But it always struck me as ignorant.
MOSLEY: The funny thing is, watching the documentary and seeing these clips, one might think, oh, well, this is in the rearview mirror, the way that interviewers interview children. But then I recently saw a video where someone stitched together a series of interviews that reporters had done with Justin Bieber when he was a child. And some of the questions were so suggestive and inappropriate. And this was just a few years ago by comparison. Why do you think there is such a need to - maybe it's not sexualize but adultify (ph), if that's even a word, child stars? You dealt with it. We see this so much with young stars, especially if they're considered, like, you know, showboats or the object of desire for young girls or boys.
SHIELDS: You know, asking Britney Spears if she's a virgin, you know, you look at that, that wasn't that long ago either. So I don't think we've really come very far, to be honest. I don't - you know, I think that we think because we're able to speak out more that the situation is changing. And I don't really see that much of a change. And they're, most of the time, you know, mostly men. But there are so many interviews where I was interviewed by women who at one point, I was - God, I must have been 13. And this woman kept asking the same question over and over, just with different words. And I finally said, excuse me, ma'am. I said, but I don't think you want my answer. And she went, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I said, I just - I keep answering it. And I keep trying to tell you that it's my truth. But you keep asking the question, so I think you want a different answer. But I can't give you a different answer because that's not - I would be lying. That's not my truth. And I thought, how the hell did I know enough or have the balls to say it to this woman, you know? I mean, Barbara Walters, on air, asked me to stand up to compare our figures because she asked me what my measurements were, as if I knew my waist in inches or centimeters, you know? I was 15. That's - and these are women and purportedly mothers. And you just think, God, do you think you have to do that to be valid? That's pretty depraved, if you ask me.
MOSLEY: I'm wondering how the sexualized depictions of you impacted your ability to take on other roles that didn't portray you as an object of desire.
SHIELDS: They were hardly an option. I mean, you know, I did tilt in "Wanda Nevada" and "Just You And Me, Kid." And those were real kid roles, you know, ate Butterfingers and drank Dr. Pepper and riding horses in the desert and rafting and, you know, got to play with musicians. And George Burns was my favorite. So I had my fair share of them. It's just that people were less interested because that wasn't what was selling. And it was easier for them to just keep me in that, you know, more exotic, sexualized because, you know, it had a direct value. And that value was monetary. So you know, I got it out of my system, you know? I got - and I did 24 Bob Hope shows, traveling all over the world and was Ms. USO. And, you know, so I had my fair share of it. It's just that, they didn't sell as much, you know, for the studios. And that's just the way it was.
GROSS: That's Brooke Shields speaking with our guest interviewer Tonya Mosley. Shields is the subject of a new documentary called "Pretty Baby" that's streaming on Hulu. After a short break, Shields will talk about her friendship with Michael Jackson and her relationship with her mother, who was an alcoholic. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIJAY IYER'S "HUMAN NATURE")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with more of our interview with Brooke Shields. There's a new documentary on Hulu about her career as a child model and actor and the sexual objectification she experienced in Hollywood as a teenager and young woman. She also became famous at the age of 12 when she played a child prostitute in the 1978 movie "Pretty Baby." The documentary is also about Shields' adult life. Brooke Shields spoke to our guest interviewer Tonya Mosley, host of the podcast Truth Be Told.
MOSLEY: Brooke, I want to talk with you about your mother, Teri Shields. You know, when you were younger, the media characterized your mother as a stage mom. And you - you've always said that that description is not entirely accurate. But your mother struggled with alcoholism. And I've heard you say something pretty powerful, that children of alcoholics learn at an early age how to navigate a situation, how to read a room, how to keep the person they love alive. Do you remember a moment or a time in your early life when you realized that that was the role you had to play to keep your mother safe?
SHIELDS: I mean, I think I've been playing - I was playing it since I could walk, you know? You just - the child is so intuitive to the mother, you know? They - the tone of a voice or the emotion - there's just - there's this crazy, crazy connection. And, I mean, I see it with my girls, and they read me immediately. And there's this thing that happens if you're a really - ostensibly, an only child with a certain parent. All I had to do was keep her alive because she was my source, you know? I was never without her and - except for when I'm at my dad's. But we were always together.
And so I just grew up knowing that there were patterns and that she needed guidance. Like, she - I had to know where I could find her. I had to know where it was going to, you know, sort of turn into, oh, we're going to be here another hour. I got to figure out how to get us out of here. And, you know - and so it just - you just intuitively start to do that. I don't think I thought about it. But then it became my focal point because I was so afraid something was going to happen to her.
MOSLEY: Yeah. Your mom died of dementia in 2012, and you've written quite a bit about your mother. You wrote a memoir that details your relationship. You've gone to therapy, and now there is this documentary. What conclusions have you come to about the choices your mother made as it relates to your career?
SHIELDS: I think my mother's choices for my career really didn't have anything to do with a career. It had to do with, how do we get from this point to the next point? How do we keep her in the public eye? Because there's power in that, and with that, our life can be better. You know, we can support ourselves. We don't have to - she doesn't have to rely on any, you know - I mean, she didn't even get - ask for alimony. When they got divorced, my mother said, you do not pay me alimony. I will find a way to make money, but you put this kid through school. And - because she never went to school. She - he had to pay for my tuitions. And, you know, I was just born. So those were the kinds of things - she wanted me to be afforded a life that she never had. And that had to be comfortable, and there had to be travel and nice things and education.
And so I think her decisions for my life - making us stay in New York, never going to California to live, never taking the high school equivalency test, stopping work and going to college - like, all those things - and always having a friend with me - like, those were all protective, personal things. So I'm more thankful for the fact that I have a life than I am disappointed in the way she sort of handled the career. Because every time we went and did a movie, we had the best time ever.
MOSLEY: Brooke, I want to talk to you about Michael Jackson. You describe your relationship with MJ as a sweet and innocent one, and you spoke at his funeral in 2009. Let's listen to a bit of your tribute.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHIELDS: We had a bond. And maybe it was because we both understood what it was like to be in the spotlight from a very, very young age. I used to tease him. And I'd say, you know, I started when I was 11 months old. You're a slacker. You were - what? - 5? Both of us needed to be adults very early. But when we were together, we were two little kids having fun.
MOSLEY: It has been a long time since Michael Jackson died. What do you reflect on, these days, when you think about him?
SHIELDS: I just - I get sad because, you know, there was - there's so much missed opportunity for him, you know? And he was so unhealthy. And his insecurity about the way he looked was so over - it was overriding, you know? And I think that that's just sad. You know, it just - I feel bad because I think that, you know, I was fighting for a real normal life outside of all of it for so long. And I had - I really had a shot at it, you know? I really was not going to get pulled down or sucked into it. And, you know, he was such a genius. But the arrested development and the other part of him was just - were never taken care of.
And so I just feel - I look back with such pleasant memories and made him laugh all the time. I would say, hey, your shoes better have to have a party. You better have a party and invite your pants down. The pants are too short. What are you doing? Why do you have a Band-Aid on your finger? It's just weird. Did you lose the other glove? I mean, come on. You know, and he would just - I just made fun of him. And so it would be - it's just sad for me to see, like, he didn't get to get what I got - you know? - what I made my - what I insisted I get.
MOSLEY: In your eulogy, you said that he could always count on you as a date. What do you think you represented for, Michael?
SHIELDS: He knew I was going to have my senses around, you know? He knew I was going to see who was coming, what was happening, who was doing this, where the picture was taking. Like, I had such this - it was like a caretaker kind of a thing. I just always said yes. He knew I'd be fun. He knew that somehow I would be grounding amidst the craziness. And it was always insanity. You know, these award shows and the mobs of people and, you know, the rocking of the cars, and, you know, it was just - and yet that was his entire life. You know, it was just his entire life. And, you know, I used to make him go to restaurants with me because I was like, you have to make yourself normal, and if people come over to the table, you can say, well, wait until we finish this meal, but right now we're having a meal. And, you know, people would respect it. He's like, how do you do that?
MOSLEY: You had to give him those types of pointers.
SHIELDS: Yeah, because no one was - he was a machine for that whole family, you know, and he was the main - main, main, main - reason and the breadwinner and the - you know, so they were protecting - you know, his mom was so sweet. I mean, his mom was the one who invited me to and asked me to speak at the memorial. And, you know, that always really sort of struck me. And, you know, the people that weren't asked were, like, mad that I was one of the people that spoke. It was just so crazy. You know, people had such propriety about him. And he just knew that I didn't want anything from him. I wasn't really - I was not enamored with the Michael Jackson of - you know, I thought he was extraordinarily talented and loved all his music, but I wasn't - I didn't fan out over him. And I think that was just so - and I needed absolutely nothing from him. You know, and I think he just sensed it.
MOSLEY: He sensed it and needed it. But, you know, the insinuation was always there that it was romantic. But it wasn't.
SHIELDS: It was the farthest thing from romantic. I mean, you know, there was one time when he grabbed me and kissed me and - when the cameras were, you know, clicking. And I was like, what are you doing? I was like, we eat candy together and watch movies, and I'm your sister. Like, don't - you don't - you need me as your friend. Find - you know, find it elsewhere. You don't - it doesn't have to be me. Like, you're not going to lose me. So don't ruin it. You know what I mean? And he was just - that wasn't in his - you know, there was nothing there because we met when we were so young. We were just - we were each other's sidekick, you know, in the mania.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SHIELDS: Nobody wanted to believe it, of course.
MOSLEY: Let's take a moment for a break. We're talking with Brooke Shields, subject of a new documentary on Hulu titled "Pretty Baby," which gives a long view of Shield's career as an '80s icon. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAQUITO D'RIVERA'S "CONTRADANZA")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and I'm Tonya Mosley. And if you're just joining us, I'm talking to Brooke Shields, Broadway, film and television actor. She's the author of several books and the host of "Now What?" - a podcast. We're talking about the new documentary on Hulu called "Pretty Baby," which brings a fuller view of when Shields came of age in public.
You hit a low point in your career after you graduated from Princeton, and you were looking for work. And you reveal in this documentary this bombshell that you were sexually assaulted by a Hollywood executive. First of all, I'm sorry that happened to you.
SHIELDS: Thank you. It's very common.
MOSLEY: You didn't tell anyone at the time. What kept you from reporting it then? And why was it important for you to share what happened now?
SHIELDS: It was absolute fear. It was fear that I would never work again. I was at such a low point in my career. And the person was so prominent, you know, in many different areas in entertainment. And I couldn't afford it. I just - I was already at a low. And people weren't ever believing anything I said. You know, it would have seemed like some desperate attempt at attention and pity. And no one would have believed me. They just - no one was believing anybody at that time. And then to be with - to have it be a powerful person was - I mean, the odds were going to be so against me. And, you know, nobody considers what it takes to go through a trial or the public scrutiny and then the victim shaming. And I was sort of shunned by Hollywood, and movies didn't want me, and TV didn't want me. And I just - I was way too scared and just wanted to block it all out.
MOSLEY: You're not naming the person who did this, but you're talking about it.
SHIELDS: I really needed to process it in my own way and on my own terms. And it took me years. But people don't want victims to process their experience the way they need to or want to. They - we want to tell them how to do it. And then we want to point the finger, and we - and that's not what I wanted to accomplish. You know, it was - it would have then become about him...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SHIELDS: ...Yet again.
MOSLEY: You know, I recently read this great article titled "I'm 45 And I Look My Age," and in it, the author makes the case that we should feel good about all forms that our bodies take as we age. It made me wonder, as someone whose livelihood has often been dependent on your looks, how has that felt? Has it felt like a relief or unsettling?
SHIELDS: You know, it's both. I mean, I can walk down the street with my 16-year-old, and I'm like, wait, what just happened? What just happened? You know, these guys were like, look at her, and I'll be like, I'm going to cut your eyeballs out, dude. You better keep walking. Keep walking, you know. And it's like - so there's that one piece where you're protective of your young, fresh, blooming beauty child, you know? And you're just like, oh, my God. And then you're also sort of like, hey, isn't she beautiful? Isn't she great?
MOSLEY: Right. Right. Yep.
SHIELDS: Isn't she sweet and pretty and tall and gorgeous and amazing, amazing. And then you're like, wait a minute. You did not look at me once. Just - you know, and you're like, what the hell happened?
MOSLEY: Yep.
SHIELDS: So there is that, like, oh, is it - what's happening to me? You know, nothing's high as it was. And then there's this just kind of reveling in it. It's - you're - it's not as exhausting as it used to be. It's not chasing youth. It's really just trying to look and feel the best that I am because this 57-year-old body has really taken me through a lot and got me here.
MOSLEY: Yeah. Towards the end of the doc, we see you with your two daughters at the dinner table and your husband talking about "Pretty Baby," the movie, and your - their thoughts about what you went through as a child actor. And your daughters - you've mentioned this - they were disturbed by some parts of your career. How, if at all, has your daughters' perceptions of your early work changed your perception of what you went through?
SHIELDS: It really was eye-opening and kind of mind-boggling to me that conversation because we had no idea it was going to happen. They weren't prompted. It wasn't - and they had seen the film, and they had very different reactions to it. On the one hand, my older daughter said, this needs to be seen. This is going to help women, people. And my other daughter was just very disturbed, never wants to see it again. The fact that anything bad happened to her mom, the fact that I had a life that existed before being their mother was just too much for her to really reconcile. And so I had to - you know, I really have had to deal differently with each of them and have open conversations. But talking to them about it, what was so unbelievable to me is I didn't feel the need to protect my mother anymore. And that - you know, even today, watching the film, I just - my heart aches for my mother. And, yes, it was such a better life than where she came from. But it could have - there could have been more for her.
MOSLEY: Brooke Shields, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much.
SHIELDS: Thank you very much for having me.
GROSS: Brooke Shields is the subject of the new documentary "Pretty Baby" that's now streaming on Hulu. She spoke with our guest interviewer, Tonya Mosley, host of the podcast Truth Be Told. After we take a short break, Ken Tucker will review Lana Del Rey's new album. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN CALE AND BRIAN ENO SONG, "SPINNING AWAY")
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] | null | [] | 2021-10-13T00:00:00 | In Latin America, in Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S., and especially in Mexico, no ghost story is told as often, discussed as enthusiastically, or interpreted as widely, as the legend of La Llorona. With this introduction, AFC kicks off a short series of blogs on La Llorona stories and songs between now and Día de Muertos | en | https://www.loc.gov/favicon.ico | The Library of Congress | https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2021/10/la-llorona-an-introduction-to-the-weeping-woman/ | Note: this is the first in a series of blog posts about La Llorona appearing in time for Día de Muertos (aka Día de los Muertos) 2021. [Find the whole series at this link!]
In Latin America, in Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S., and especially in Mexico, no ghost story is told as often, discussed as enthusiastically, or interpreted as widely, as the legend of La Llorona. “La Llorona” literally means “the weeping woman,” so it’s not surprising that the main characteristic shared by all stories of “La Llorona” is that she weeps. Other than that one defining trait, the specter known as “La Llorona” varies widely: many stories are told of what she looks like and what she does, and even more are told of how she came to be such a doleful spirit.
A diverse array of La Llorona stories can be found in news accounts and across the internet. You can also find many collected in the book The Weeping Woman: Encounters with La Llorona by Edward Garcia Kraul and Judith Beatty. Looking through such stories, you’ll find many variations: sometimes La Llorona sees you from afar and pursues you, terrifying you as you flee toward your home. Sometimes she appears riding a horse. Sometimes she appears in your horse-drawn wagon or in your car, warning you against bad behavior, before disappearing, just like that other famous spirit, the vanishing hitchhiker. In some stories, an encounter with her is fatal.
La Llorona is often closely associated with children. In some stories, she is said to wail for her own lost or dead children; in many of these stories, she killed her own children when she was alive and is doomed for her actions to be a wandering ghost. In other stories, she appears mainly to women who have children, while in still others, she kidnaps children, who are never seen again.
Of course, we do have some versions of the story tucked away in the dark corners of collections at the American Folklife Center and elsewhere at the Library of Congress. One great source is Bess Lomax Hawes’s classic paper “La Llorona in Juvenile Hall,” which is an account and interpretation of stories about La Llorona circulating in a juvenile detention center in California in the 1960s. AFC has available online the published paper in the Bess Lomax Hawes collection at this link, as well as an early draft of the paper in the Alan Lomax collection, here.
Hawes’s paper provides a variety of views on La Llorona, including the young women’s stories, her review of other scholars’ work, and her own interpretations. In the essay, Hawes described the many faces, literal and figurative, worn by La Llorona:
La Llorona typically appears as a malevolent spirit, either a harbinger or a direct cause of misfortune to the living. Sometimes she takes the form of a “dangerous siren,” tempting a solitary male late at night by confronting him as a pitiful, woebegone figure hidden under a rebozo. When offered assistance, she turns on the solicitous gentleman the face of a skeleton or a wild metallic horse’s head or no face at all. Sometimes she is observed simply roaming about at a distance, or most typically, she is heard weeping and shrieking through the night. A chance meeting with her is dangerous.
Hawes also provided verbatim transcripts from children in juvenile detention. Here is a typical example:
La Llorona has long hair and walks around crying. I heard from the counsellors at Juvie that she had two kids that she drowned because they were bad. She drowned them in Tijuana. She attacks bad kids in Juvie. They say it is true.
Another adds more gruesome details:
It is a woman who wasn’t quite all there who killed her three girls, 13 to 17 years old. She didn’t want them because something had happened to her husband, and they reminded her of him, so she drowned them. Their bones are buried in her back. She doesn’t know they are dead. She wears a long black cape with a peaked hood and goes around institutions and foster homes looking for her kids. If she sees a girl who looks like one of her daughters, she tries to cut out that feature. She comes around three days after it rains.
Stories like the ones from Hawes’s collection are not full narratives but more like descriptions detailing what La Llorona generally does and what she looks like, with brief narrative passages about her origin. One more text of this sort seems worth including, since it contains many descriptions of the ghost’s activities, since it has been very influential, and since it is available online from the Library of Congress. It was published by Thomas Allibone Janvier in 1906 in Harper’s Magazine, and was reprinted in many newspapers, including the Washington, D.C. Evening Star on November 29, 1906–see the last column. I’ll reprint the text below:
AS IS generally known, Señor, many bad things are met with by night in the streets of the City; but this Wailing Woman, La Llorona, is the very worst of them all. She is worse by far than the vaca de lumbre–that at midnight comes forth from the potrero of San Pablo and goes galloping through the streets like a blazing whirlwind, breathing forth from her nostrils smoke and sparks and flames: because the Fiery Cow, Señor, while a dangerous animal to look at, really does no harm whatever–and La Llorona is as harmful as she can be!
Seeing her walking quietly along the quiet street–at the times when she is not running, and shrieking for her lost children–she seems a respectable person, only odd looking because of her white petticoat and the white reboso with which her head is covered, and anybody might speak to her. But whoever does speak to her, in that very same moment dies!
The beginning of her was so long ago that no one knows when was the beginning of her; nor does any one know anything about her at all. But it is known certainly that at the beginning of her, when she was a living woman, she committed bad sins. As soon as ever a child was born to her she would throw it into one of the canals which surround the City, and so would drown it; and she had a great many children, and this practice in regard to them she continued for a long time. At last her conscience began to prick her about what she did with her children; but whether it was that the priest spoke to her, or that some of the saints cautioned her in the matter, no one knows. But it is certain that because of her sinnings she began to go through the streets in the darkness weeping and wailing. And presently it was said that from night till morning there was a wailing woman in the streets; and to see her, being in terror of her, many people went forth at midnight; but none did see her, because she could be seen only when the street was deserted and she was alone.
Sometimes she would come to a sleeping watchman, and would waken him by asking: “What time is it?” And he would see a woman clad in white standing beside him with her reboso drawn over her face. And he would answer: “It is twelve hours of the night.” And she would say: “At twelve hours of this day I must be in Guadalajara!”–or it might be in San Luis Potosí, or in some other far-distant city–and, so speaking, she would shriek bitterly: “Where shall I find my children?”–and would vanish instantly and utterly away. And the watchman would feel as though all his senses had gone from him, and would become as a dead man. This happened many times to many watchmen, who made report of it to their officers; but their officers would not believe what they told. But it happened, on a night, that an officer of the watch was passing by the lonely street beside the church of Santa Anita. And there he met with a woman wearing a white reboso and a white petticoat; and to her he began to make love. He urged her, saying: “Throw off your reboso that I may see your pretty face!” And suddenly she uncovered her face–and what he beheld was a bare grinning skull set fast to the bare bones of a skeleton! And while he looked at her, being in horror, there came from her fleshless jaws an icy breath; and the iciness of it froze the very heart’s blood in him, and he fell to the earth heavily in a deathly swoon. When his senses came back to him he was greatly troubled. In fear he returned to the Diputacion, and there told what had befallen him. And in a little while his life forsook him and he died.
What is most wonderful about this Wailing Woman, Señor, is that she is seen in the same moment by different people in places widely apart: one seeing her hurrying across the atrium of the Cathedral; another beside the Arcos de San Cosme; and yet another near the Salto del Agua, over by the prison of Belen. More than that, in one single night she will be seen in Monterey and in Oaxaca and in Acapulco–the whole width and length of the land apart–and whoever speaks with her in those far cities, as here in Mexico, immediately dies in fright. Also, she is seen at times in the country. Once some travellers coming along a lonely road met with her, and asked: “Where go you on this lonely road?” And for answer she cried: “Where shall I find my children?” and, shrieking, disappeared. And one of the travellers went mad. Being come here to the City they told what they had seen; and were told that this same Wailing Woman had maddened or killed many people here also.
Because the Wailing Woman is so generally known, Señor, and so greatly feared, few people now stop her when they meet with her to speak with her–therefore few now die of her, and that is fortunate. But her loud keen wailings, and the sound of her running feet, are heard often; and especially in nights of storm. I myself, Señor, have heard the running of her feet and her wailings; but I never have seen her. God forbid that I ever shall!
In 1910 Harper Brothers reprinted Janvier’s series as the book Legends of the City of Mexico, where he included notes and references. From these, we know that the story above was related to him by a friend, Gilberto Cano, a native and resident of Mexico City, who was an amateur antiquarian and shared Janvier’s interests in Mexican history and folklore.
In addition to stories like these, which combine a description of what La Llorona typically does with hints to her possible origins, longer and more detailed stories about La Llorona’s life, death, and return as a ghost are also common. Such stories circulate in oral tradition, and are also often included in children’s books and short novels, including Rudolfo A. Anaya’s novel The Legend of La Llorona, Joe Hayes’s children’s book La Llorona: The Weeping Woman, and Anaya’s children’s book La Llorona: The Crying Woman.
Here’s a version of this type which comes from a friend of AFC:
A long, long time ago there lived a woman named Maria. She was the most beautiful woman in all of Mexico, muy hermosa, and she herself knew it too. Day after day, male suitors begged her for her hand in romance, but day after day men returned home defeated, con el corazón roto. This was the livelihood of Maria until a dashing young gentleman galloped into town and turned Maria’s life upside down; ella se volvió loca. She knew in an instant that she had to have him, for he was the only man to match her in beauty and in elegance. Soon they were to be wed, and not long after had two delightful chiquititos. This delight however was short lived, for one damning day the dashing gentleman became grotesque as he rode into town with another woman at his side. He rode up to Maria and pledged his life to this new woman whom he barely met, because his current wife was no longer beautiful. Maria’s heart burst into tiny shards of glass, invisible to the eye but painful for those handling it. That night, in a fit of sorrow and anger Maria decided to inflict the same agony toward the man that bestowed it upon her. Maria woke her two boys up, took their hands, and guided them to the river “for a bath.” Hand in hand, the three figures immersed themselves in the water…but under their mother’s hand, the little niños never came up for air. After the blood red glare of fury faded from sight, Maria realized what she had done. She shrieked from the gallows of her soul, “Mis Niños!” before letting the river water fill up her lungs. It is said now, this weeping woman or La Llorona has returned from the hereafter, searching for new children to claim as her own for all eternity.
This is the version remembered by AFC’s recent intern, Camille Acosta. Camille heard about La Llorona from several family members while growing up, and this is the story that stuck with her the most. When she was earning her master’s degree in Folklore at Western Kentucky University, Camille decided to do research on La Llorona, and collected stories from her family and others. She presented them, with fascinating interview material and her own perceptive interpretations, in her master’s thesis, which is available here.
As an Anglophone man of non-Hispanic and non-Indigenous descent, rather than interpreting La Llorona, I will give the last word to Camille. But first, I’ll point out that this week marks the end of National Hispanic Heritage Month, but not the end of what we might loosely call the Halloween and Día de Muertos season. So I’m happy to announce that I’ll be publishing a short series of blogs on La Llorona stories and songs between now and Día de Muertos, culminating in an episode of the Folklife Today podcast in which we’ll interview Camille Acosta, AFC reference specialist Allina Migoni, and the fantastic folklorist and musician Juan Díes. I’ll use these blogs to point to well known and lesser known versions of the story, as well as the works of other scholars who have treated the legend in their work.
So who is La Llorona? For Camille, she is “the first concept of fear many of us [Mexican Americans] have ever experienced; she is our anxieties’ origin story.”
Camille also observes:
No two individuals view La Llorona in the same way. For example, the children I interviewed mostly saw La Llorona as a ghostly apparition more than willing to instill fear in young ones who misbehave. For the young adults including myself, there was description of La Llorona not just as a ghost but as a monster making us feel isolated from normalcy. For my parents however, La Llorona wavered from being a mother with the world on her shoulders to a key for escaping the harsh realities of life through ostension. Every single informant viewed the Llorona as a unique and personalized character in their own minds.
And she makes the important point:
La Llorona is not only a reflection of our innermost fears, but she is the living breathing proof that we can overcome them as well. Her narrative passed down for centuries is a reminder that our voices are being listened to and acknowledged, La Llorona is understood more and more each and every day. And in a way, so are we. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 22 | https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/my-beautiful-friend/ | en | My Beautiful Friend | [
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"Grazie Sophia Christie",
"Alisha Dietzman",
"Jessie Kindig",
"Noelle Bodick"
] | 2023-07-19T10:41:33+00:00 | Toward the end of my teens, it began to dawn on me that my face was probably fully formed. That no radical change was forthcoming. […] | en | The Point Magazine | https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/my-beautiful-friend/ | Toward the end of my teens, it began to dawn on me that my face was probably fully formed. That no radical change was forthcoming. That even back when I still held out hope, my features were meanwhile settling, treacherous, into a mediocrity which surprised, humiliated, crushed me. In other words, I was not going to be any great beauty. I was only going to be what I was: attractive occasionally, like most people, relative to whoever happened to stand nearby. I was horrified; I couldn’t get over it. Being average-looking is, by definition, completely normal. Why hadn’t anyone prepared me for it?
I could not have discovered I was plain without discovering K was pretty. She is my friend of many years. Back then, it obsesses me: how we make each other exist. We attend elementary school together, then high school. She enrolls at a nearby college. Her tall grants me my short; my plump her skinny; her leonine features my pedestrian ones. I resent her as much as I exult in her company. In between us, and without words for it, the female universe dilates, a continuum whose comparative alchemy seems designed to confront me, make me suffer, lift her up. Her protagonism diminishes me, or does it? I confuse myself for a long time thinking I am the planet, and K is the sun. It takes me a long time to forgive her.
Comparison steals my joy, but it also gives me a narrative. All in all, it feels radical to make a world together, she and I, a silent tournament of first kisses, compliments, report cards. I live at a fixed point from K, her lucky arms, her lucky neck, her lucky elbows. I pursue beautiful friends like some women do men who will strike them in bed at night. On account of our addictive relativity. On account of my envy, which I’ve made, like many women, the secret passion of my life.
●
There’s something gorgeously petty about many women’s lives. They’re not trying to be great. They’re trying to be better. It’s why women diet together; dye their hair light, then dark, then light again; dress for each other; race to get engaged; wait to get divorced; find a taken man more attractive than a free one. Become girlbosses in droves and then give it up. A woman can spend her whole life in real or imagined competition with her friends, finding herself in the gaps between them. Especially in the game of looks, there is no excellence that is not another woman’s inadequacy, no abundance that does not mean lack. A great beauty is discovered, like crude oil, or gold. That means in a parched desert, or a dirty riverbed, where the rest of us must languish. Our democratic sensibility commands us to raze all unfairness. Yet the way we sacralize beauty, our treatment of the women who try to level it, our satisfaction when no one can, calls our bluff.
For me, the humiliations stack up. I nurse them like little children. I pick at them like scabs. The horrid boy I desperately love, who pretends to love me, studying K’s legs on the trampoline. We are seventeen, and I study them too. Up and down, slender, hairless, vanishing up the thighs, into the sun. Later he sends her a message on Facebook. She does nothing to betray me. What I want is for those legs and the mat of the trampoline to go rigid, to snap, for her bones to spray and splinter, to pierce me through the eyes, so I cannot look at either of us anymore.
Or, a couple years later, when I believe I’ve matured, gotten over it, displaying my fake ID at a college party. It’s my friend’s, I explain. It’s K’s. How funny. It works, we look just enough alike. A drunken classmate laughs. “Yes,” he says. “Except she’s hotter than you.” My face silences him, then the room. His words spread my legs, pass a hand through me, find something dying. He apologizes until I console him. I return to my dorm and drown in abjection, almost pleasurably at this point. I’d like to call my mother, whom I resemble. Except that in all of our talks of puberty, she omitted this. She gave me my face and felt guilty; I had to learn for myself how my suffering held something up.
My own inglorious adolescence ends with me dumped, over brunch, at twenty. He has a strong jaw which dazes and a soft birthmark, near the mouth. He is ten years older than me. That last bit is not the part that hurts. It’s that he’s telling me about another girl. “She’s amazing,” he says. “I haven’t felt like this in a long time.” I think of what we’ve done for a long time and I go to the bathroom and vomit. When I come back he’s still speaking. I wonder, in silence, what it would be like to be the sort of girl about whom they say, he can’t shut up about her. “She’s a writer,” he tells me, with love in his eyes. He looks so handsome, I want to kiss him, exactly now, when, because, he can’t shut up about her. I go home, look her up, write a poem, get over him as soon as I get it published, thinking vaguely, see, there, that was easy, take that—I might be less lovely, but there are other competitions, I can be a writer too.
●
In those bad years I read and reread a story by Émile Zola called “Rentafoil.” A satire, it tells of a wicked entrepreneur, Durandeau, who cooks up a nasty scheme of renting out ugly women as living foils for better-looking ones. Strolling around nineteenth-century Paris, observing “two girls tripping along,” one pretty and one ugly, Durandeau realizes that the ugly woman is an “adornment worn” by her prettier companion. She makes her look good. Her asymmetry sets off her symmetry; her dull face, her shining one. For five francs an hour, Durandeau’s agency makes available to the “upper crust” ugly women to drag about town. There’s nothing like the “pleasure of a pretty woman leaning on the arm of an ugly one,” knowing herself enhanced. And nothing like the sorrow of their Foils, who “fret and fume and sob” at night. Finally, the narrator confesses that he “may write the Secret Memoirs of a Foil,” inspired by one “terribly jealous” employee, lovesick and bitter, who reads too much. “Can you imagine her resentment?” the narrator asks. I could.
But take the first plain girl that inspires Durandeau. She isn’t employed or receiving a salary, but she must be getting something. Or else why on earth would she tolerate it? The unfairness of beauty, the pinch of being its friend. The comforting fable says: the great beauty hurts us like a splinter but helps us like a measuring stick to understand ourselves. Affords us insight, depth. An opportunity to compensate. After all, it’s the plain woman about whom the narrator of “Rentafoil” wants to write, not the beautiful one. I study that poem by Yeats. Waxing about “Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle.” How casual, I think. How vicious. If she read that, the girl who wasn’t a gazelle, she probably never recovered. It strikes me only later that she might not have wanted to. For what we tolerate of beauty—that pinch—is also, curiously, what we reap from it.
From Austen to Ferrante, women’s literature is ripe with dyads of women, made up of a beautiful half and a less beautiful half. Here, the arbitrariness of beauty plays out in long, anguished plots, games of chutes and ladders, whereby some women find themselves socially, magically, economically mobile, and others do not, at least not so easily. We recognize the “winner” as soon as we read what she looks like. In first-person stories, more often than not, it’s not the narrator. These plain heroines yearn for, resent, are fascinated by, love, hate, cannot stay away from, their more beautiful, fortunate counterparts. They articulate a precisely feminine pain I know well, worse than menstrual cramps. A sense of one’s own plainness. Inferiority. An envy so profound and wistful it is almost sexually charged.
This tone in women’s literature, this snake twist of the belly that signals envy in the same place as desire, engrosses me. Some of the most exquisite passages of eroticism are in the voice of women envious of other women. Wanting them? Sometimes. Wanting to be them? Naturally. I watch K do the dishes, in her bikini top and her peasant skirt, and the tight abdomen that is an insult, and the overhead light that haloes her hair, careless, the soap, the suds, the satisfaction she must feel. In that moment, I want to take the dishcloth and wipe my face from the face of the earth.
●
I read, at first, in search of consolation prizes.
In the Neapolitan quartet, Elena Ferrante shows how unfairness, like money, accumulates; beauty forms the mask of what crushes, monopolizes, outshines. Lenù, the narrator, is a dogged teacher’s pet, born into poverty, who becomes a successful feminist writer mainly thanks to her diligence. Lila, her best friend, is a wünderkind. Along with “virtuosity” and the power to invent, Lila gets “an odor of wildness” and an “energy that dazed” men, “like the swelling sound of beauty arriving” to Naples. Lenù gets pimples and glasses. Some sirocco wind is always at Lila’s back, making her wealthy; making her loved; making her angry, brave, righteous; almost a model, or perhaps an actress, except she is married so young; the hero, the innovator, the victim, the star.
My insistence on fairness nearly convinces me that, in losing, Lenù must be winning something else. After all, what she envies of Lila is exactly what Lila, in turn, provides her with: content. That’s why Lenù sticks around. When a woman resembles a movie star, her conditions of living take cinematic turns. Life occurs to her quickly, impossibly, like the montage of romance, while the plainer girl plods along, a subject better suited to a documentary. But Lila’s shimmering existence seeps into Lenù’s. The “daily exercise” of noting the “convergences and divergences” between them, the “lines between moments and events” and those deus ex machinas which evade one and land on the other. Envy makes Lenù observant, a student of contrast. Which is to say a better writer—good thing, since we all write ourselves. While everyone plays the main character of their own lives, the plain girl is forced to be a little more thoughtful. She’d be written by Woolf, not Hemingway.
Doesn’t being graceful just mean not having to think? Nothing is laborious, everything is effortless, every morning Christmas morning since puberty left so many gifts. The awkward plain girl is driven, instead, to self-obsession. To make a craft of her posture, her eating habits, her odor, her laugh, why they fail her, how to improve them, the variations that make them superior and winsome in that favored someone else. The symbol of being a plain girl is a heart trying hard. Erasing, scribbling. Romanticizing her contours. Narrativizing her lack.
This is the bone Ferrante throws the plain girls, only to toss it out. Lenù becomes the writer, sure, but even what shines in her writing, we are given to understand, derives from Lila’s unpublished work, effortless, with a “force of seduction” Lenù can only contain, transmit, emulate, as if tracing the path of a comet with her stubby pencil. Whatever prompt for reflection or observation Lenù extracts from Lila, Lila extracts from Lenù too. In other words, don’t kid yourself, even Lenù’s silver lining lies in Lila’s shadow.
Perhaps the plight of the plain girl is redeemed by its realism. Women age terribly. The homely woman gets there first. Everyone knows the genetically blessed woman remains better insulated, to some degree, from humiliation, male disdain, poverty. That Joan Didion thought the streetlights would turn green for her strikes one as rather unhinged, until one sees her photograph, and knows it with certainty. Beauty opens like a trapdoor, to second chances, the benefit of the doubt, a job you’re unqualified for, someone who will marry you, if you so require. The cost may be a life out of touch. The plain woman operates under fewer illusions, always a little closer to the truth. In Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell’s last, unfinished Victorian novel, provincial Molly finds herself the stepsister of worldly Cynthia, whose “beautiful, tall, swaying figure” brews predictable scandal and then sidesteps it, at Molly’s cost. For Cynthia wears “her armor of magic”—they all do, letting her slip, eellike, out of the usual scrapes, if only to then get into others. The unfortunate and nameless protagonist of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, fifteen, compares herself to her classmate, Hélène Lagonelle. Hélène is a virgin, her body “the most beautiful of all the things given by God.” One feels, as one reads, the monsoon brewing. Hélène is “infinitely more marriageable,” but “doesn’t know” what the girl with no name does, of typical survival. Of course not. We’ve read what she looks like. Such knowledge might be worth the price of plainness, if only it didn’t require knowing women like Hélène. “She makes you want to kill her,” the girl confesses.
And what of that final possible solace: that beauty is attended by its own kind of suffering. Objectification. Underestimation. Abuse. Too many men and their egos. Even more seductive an idea: Do beauty’s higher highs mean lower lows? Does whatever miracle that plucks a beauty from the crowd set her up, too, for catastrophe? Crowns her a princess just to cut off her head? Look at Lila in the Neapolitan quartet; she might get special treatment, but she also gets beaten. She loses a child; her anguish is as sharp as her fine bones. Plain Lenù studies, applies herself to an uphill climb, a subdued figure against a headwind, yes, but she does end up, on the whole, better off.
Yet whatever delusional peace this line of inquiry brings us, Ferrante snatches back. No suffering of Lila’s stops Lenù from being jealous of her. “What more do you want?” Lenù asks Lila, bitterly. But what more does Lenù want of Lila? The answer is as simple and complicated, as shallow and treacherously deep, as: Lila’s face, Lila’s body. The Neapolitan quartet undercuts that old, soothing sentence, that compulsive effort to compensate, to equalize, one that my own brother noted I used spitefully in high school, whenever he mentioned a pretty girl: “Yes, she’s beautiful, but…” But nothing. We might identify with Lenù, but who reads Ferrante’s books and wants to be anyone but Lila? It’s not all good, it’s just everything.
●
I fly from Marrakech to London. I wait in line at the airport as a young man is berating a young woman, who begins to cry. I board and discover that by some hellish providence, the woman is sitting next to me. I’m looking good these days, perhaps because I’m finally well-loved, but that’s for another story. The girl tells me everything. She lists atrocities but saves, in a quiet voice, the worst for last. “He said I was average-looking.” I can hardly stand to meet her eyes. The boy is a few rows behind us, chatting up a pretty stranger. “You’re not,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.” I touch her back. Something is happening between us, very wonderful and sad. Then in the middle of her sobs she holds her hands up, and laughs a little. “I’m sorry,” she says, and then crying harder, her voice breaking: “It’s just your hair. It looks so… beautiful. It seems so… soft.” It’s hurting her. I put it up.
In the first of the Neapolitan novels, Ferrante places a wealthy, “superior” girl in green—green shoes, green jacket, green bowler hat—green, the color of envy, in Lenù and Lila’s path. By the second book Lila remains worried over her. “You’re much prettier than the girl in green,” Lenù consoles her, then thinks, “It’s not true, I’m lying.”
●
Some evenings I watch the reality TV show Love Is Blind, where the hierarchy of beauty I resent is toppled, then reasserted, to my masochistic schadenfreude. Singles date without laying eyes on each other, only meeting after becoming engaged. No one fares worse in the program than the unattractive woman paired with the better-looking man. Consider her fate as I do, on the couch, over ice cream. Alone, she meets her new fiancé. He kisses, compliments, gropes her, perhaps sincerely. She’s gorgeous, he says. She isn’t. We eye him as suspiciously as she is beside herself with joy. Days later, at a pool party, the couples reconvene. He sees the other women for the first time, and beside them, her, the one he chose, at last in context. His face falls. It is precisely at this moment he ceases to love her.
Other evenings I switch on I Am Georgina, on Netflix. It infuriates me, her story, the whole premise, Georgina Rodríguez, the surprising partner of football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo. How, like millions of other women, she once worked in a shop, playing nice with her customers, despising her days. How, unlike millions of other women, there existed something in her face so naturally beautiful as to unnerve Ronaldo, to stop him in his tracks when shopping, to impel him to take an interest in her. To move her into his mansions, where she might live in luxury, taking care of his mysterious, surrogate-born children, accruing Instagram followers, purses, a reality show, the guiltless blessings of the born lucky. She goes to work by bus. She leaves by Bugatti, forever. It riles me up. I turn on the television and I watch her and watch her until I love her and hate her, as I might a friend.
●
At the first faint signs of aging, relentless K is swift to get work done. Botox. It rankles me. We’re 26 now; isn’t she tired? Energy is neither created nor destroyed, so I search my forehead for her wrinkles and find them. I visit her dermatologist, taking the long way, dragging my feet, vain enough to have booked the appointment but not so vain I would have gone unprompted. The doctor prescribes me: one syringe of filler, to raise me from one level to another, as she did my friend. I infer: two syringes, to close our gap, make us level. An old wish. I nod, close my eyes, grip the table. Beauty, incoming. She readies the needle, then the first injection site. My eyes sting, I think, at the scent of the alcohol pad. Then some misgiving in my face stops her. “You know,” she says, slowly, “You and K are not the same, you are different types of… attractive, you don’t need to rush this.” Implicitly: I’m not as pretty. I have no such pressure, to prejuvenate, or invest. I sit up. The insult frees me. I could almost kiss her. I float to my car and drive home dancing, catching my flaws in the rearview mirror, like darlings an editor didn’t make me cut.
I’d gone to finally compete with K but settled for comparison, that poignant force that had always pushed me, turned my page, compelled me to try harder, thickened our plot by lending it subtext. I’m not the beautiful friend; that’s not my category. In the schema of how I understand myself, it’s simply not my place. The hierarchy of beauty parcels out different experiences of femininity. Mine mattered, and had grown on me, or perhaps I had grown around it.
And we reach a point where we can talk about it. Not our own looks, which we always discussed, but the no-man’s-land that always sprawled between them. We thought it was contested, but really it was ours. I broach it carefully, at first, like it will bring her power over me. I broach it more boldly when I realize it brings power to us both. A sense of freedom. K reads the draft of this essay. I act out the fake ID scene and we laugh. It’s different than when we were thirteen, at the beach, and I asked the child we babysat who was prettier, and then I put my face in the water like a Victorian heroine and tried to drown myself, but not very hard. Something has changed. We’re getting older. The breathtaking beauty of a young girl eventually exhales, deflates, we all start looking similar, in a decade or two we’ll fall into some binary of well-kept or not well-kept, and then what’ll matter is money, which fingers crossed I’ll have. But with beauty slowly, imperceptibly, leaving her, am I losing something also?
I might be no great beauty, but I’m no innocent, either: the only thing that feels better than being chosen is being slighted. I knew what I was doing, with that boy, with my classmate, the child we babysat, forcing each to play a test where the right answer, K, would always be wrong, would always shock me, gloriously, painfully, but never surprise me, confirming as it did what I already, irrevocably, knew. The rehearsed and yet devastated response it gives me license to perform. Admit it. There’s a power to melodrama; it’s why they call it drama queen. I have a stunning friend who applies lotion to her stunning body, religiously, every night, from her clavicle to her small Egyptian toes, and perhaps this is my version of that. A confused self-caress, interspersed with slaps, which smarts, yes, but says: this is my body, I am here, give me a story, send pathos in my direction, eye rolls allowed.
We play these scenes over and over again like dirges. When Nino picks Lila over Lenù in the second book of the Neapolitan quartet, the sky falls in our stomachs. Yet why does it feel so good? Who can explain our anticipation of that, our desire to see it exercised, exorcised? I’m trying. The night that Lenù learns that Lila and Nino have kissed, she uses “poems and novels as tranquilizers” to subdue her grief. She crafts a narrative, a “frame of unattainability” in which her bitterness becomes “utterable.” Isn’t that what, by reading, we are doing? Isn’t that why I stay less pretty than K? For the sake of extra practice. Practice at making, as we all must, a bearable poetry, a livable story, with characters and twists, of that which would otherwise kill us. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 77 | https://time.com/6289787/barbie-movie-history-mattel/ | en | Why It Took 64 Years to Make a Barbie Movie | [
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] | 2023-06-27T11:05:37+00:00 | It's officially the summer of Barbie: Here's a long look at the history of the Barbie movie, as told by the director, stars, and Mattel execs. | en | /favicon.ico | TIME | https://time.com/6289787/barbie-movie-history-mattel/ | Barbie is an icon, perhaps the best known toy in the world. As Margot Robbie points out in an interview with me for a TIME cover story, the word “Barbie” has the sort of enviable global recognition only achieved by brands like Coca-Cola. Since her debut in 1959, she has been a staple of the culture, a touchpoint for pop icons like Nicki Minaj, and has become synonymous with a specific shade of pink.
And yet it has somehow taken until 2023 for Barbie to make her live-action film debut. On July 21, the doll will finally grace the big screen. While there have been a number of animated Barbie movies and series on Nickelodeon and streaming services, Barbie will be the first live-action movie starring the doll to premiere in theaters. Margot Robbie will play a version of Barbie, but so will Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, and a number of other actors. Ryan Gosling will play just one of many Kens. Every image from the film, beginning with paparazzi shots of Robbie and Gosling rollerskating in spandex, has been dissected online, and Barbiecore has never been hotter.
Read More: How Barbie Came to Life
More from TIME
It’s officially the summer of Barbie. But the journey here was complicated. In the eight years I have spent reporting on Mattel, other potential Barbie movies have come and gone. The toy company and filmmakers struggled with how to deal with Barbie’s baggage: The traditionally thin-waisted, blonde-haired doll has long been criticized for setting unrealistic body standards. Even after Mattel introduced a Curvy Barbie in 2016 (a major change I documented in a TIME cover story), the original Barbie has stuck in people’s minds.
Out now: TIME’s new special edition about Barbie is available at newsstands and here online
Plus, Barbie is intentionally a blank slate upon which girls can project their dreams and desires. That makes conjuring one specific story for the movie particularly difficult. “As simple as an 11-and-a-half-inch doll looks, Barbie is a complicated brand,” says President and COO of Mattel Richard Dickson.
But when Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz took over the company in 2018, he decided it was time to commit to a Barbie movie. The film would be the first entry in a burgeoning cinematic universe based on the company’s toys. In 2018, Robbie signed on to star and produce Barbie, and Warner Bros. announced that Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach had joined as screenwriters a year later.
Here’s the history of how Barbie made it to the big screen—and why it took so long for her to get here.
Mattel is protective of the Barbie brand
Mattel has been incredibly cautious when it comes to its most valuable asset—and rightly so. Barbie has spent much of her history as the bestselling doll in the world.
Barbie devotees would tell you that she inspires little girls to imagine themselves in any profession—astronaut, president, veterinarian. But the doll—and its creators—have also been called out by parents concerned over how she affects their children’s self-esteem. Over the years songs like Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and even throwaway lines in movies like Legally Blonde—when a Harvard Law student disdainfully calls Elle Woods “Malibu Barbie”—have not exactly bolstered Barbie’s reputation as a figure of female empowerment.
Any portrayal of Barbie onscreen would be inherently fraught, and the company hasn’t always had a sense of humor about its iconic doll. When Barbie appeared as a supporting character in Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4 in the 2010s, Mattel creatives emphasized to me that it was a big a deal the company ceded any control to Pixar and allowed the studio to poke fun at Barbie and Ken. Years earlier, Mattel sued Aqua over “Barbie Girl.” Cut to 2023, and one of the most eagerly anticipated songs on the Barbie soundtrack is Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice’s “Barbie World,” which samples Aqua.
Why Amy Schumer’s Barbie didn’t happen
When Amy Schumer signed on to play the doll in a live-action movie in 2016, the comedian had cemented herself as a sharp feminist voice in pop culture. Her Comedy Central sketch show, Inside Amy Schumer, took no mercy when it came to skewering the patriarchy. She regularly poked fun at blustering men who didn’t find her “hot enough” and companies that exploited women in order to sell them products. It was difficult to imagine Mattel, a company that had spent millions maintaining an immaculate image for its doll, would submit to Schumer’s particular brand of humor. Mattel wanted Barbie to inspire. Any comedic take would inevitably take the doll down a peg. Schumer recently said she left the movie because that version wasn’t “feminist and cool,” as she assumes Gerwig’s version will be.
COO and President of Mattel Richard Dickson, who has been with the company long enough to see several potential movies come and go, argues that until Gerwig, the company “never found the right storyteller” for Barbie.
Mattel is now eager to prove it is in on the joke. In Gerwig’s film, the company is run by executives who take umbrage at anyone who points out it’s strange that so many men in suits are running a brand for little girls. And the movie acknowledges Barbie’s complicated impact on girls’ body image in exchanges with modern women we won’t spoil here.
Rae, who plays President Barbie in the new movie, points out that calling someone Barbie “does have a negative connotation,” she says. “You’re like, ‘Oh that person might be a bimbo. That person might be dumb. That person is superficial.’ This movie presents an opportunity not to change that, but add more onto it and clear her name in a pretty cool way.”
Read More: How Greta Gerwig Got Barbie—From the Clothes to the Dream House—Just Right
Gerwig also seems to have a love for the doll that transcends that of the typical filmmaker. During interviews for the story, she delighted in telling me about playing with the dolls as a child for “way too long”—a giddiness that seemed to manifest in the world-building she did with Barbie. “One of the most endearing things parts of the process with Greta was her appreciation of the brand’s history,” says Dickson. “It was a matter of finding the right talent that can appreciate the brand’s authenticity and bring that controversy to life in a way that, yes, pokes fun at us but ultimately is purposeful and has heart.”
But even signing onto Gerwig’s version took some effort on the part of Mattel. Robbie Brenner, the first executive producer of Mattel Films, told executives they would have to “white knuckle it” through the creative process with Gerwig and Baumbach, and learn that a dose of self-depreciation can go a long way.
Is the movie about one Barbie or many Barbies?
The question of who, exactly, would play Barbie was paramount. Mattel recently took great pains to modernize its doll. Nearly a decade ago, in 2014, Barbie had a very bad year: The Elsa doll from Frozen dethroned Barbie as the most popular toy for girls, and Lego surpassed Mattel as the biggest toy company. Sinking sales forced Mattel to rethink the brand, manifesting in the introduction of new skin tones and hair types in 2015 and new body shapes in 2016.
Read More: Barbie’s Got a New Body
One of the reasons Mattel resisted putting Barbie on the big screen for so long was that they had worked to establish that Barbie wasn’t just a skinny beach-bound blonde. There are, in fact, 175 different Barbies with different hair, skin tones, body shapes, and abilities. If Amy Schumer or Anne Hathaway (who was once also attached to play the doll) stood in for Barbie, an otherwise blank canvas would forever be connected to a single actor. If it worked, profits would grow. If it didn’t, decades of Mattel’s hard work would be undone.
The idea that many Barbies would populate Gerwig’s movie arose early in the creative process. In fact, it’s what intrigued Robbie as a producer: “I don’t think you should say, ‘This is the one version of what Barbie is, and that’s what women should aspire to be and look like and act like.'”
Mattel now wants to build a cinematic universe
A Barbie movie probably never would have come to fruition if it weren’t for Mattel CEO Kreiz. In 2018, Kreiz took over the position at a moment of vulnerability for the company. He was the fourth CEO in just four years. He articulated a vision for Mattel that was rooted in intellectual property management. That plan included more streaming shows, games, a theme park currently under construction in Arizona, and movies. Lots of movies. An entire universe of movies. “Once you think of all those people who buy your product not just as consumers but as fans, you realize you have an audience and all these other opportunities become obvious,” says Kreiz.
Marvel and DC have found tremendous success making dozens of films based on stories that already had a built-in fanbase of comics readers. And it just so happens that film audiences seem to be tiring of superheroes. (Look no further than recent box office underperformers like The Flash and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.) Studios are now in search of other known IP that has not yet been adapted into film. Recent successes like Super Mario Bros. and Dungeons & Dragons suggest that audiences, too, are ready for something new, if still a bit familiar.
Kreiz believed Mattel was sitting on a gold mine of well-known brands—Barbie, Hot Wheels, American Girl, even the Magic 8 Ball. So he created Mattel Films, a studio inside the company, and hired Oscar-nominated producer Brenner to run the show. Mattel has since announced 15 movies, including a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em film with Vin Diesel, a Hot Wheels movie produced by J.J. Abrams, and even a Barney reboot with Daniel Kaluuya.
But Kreiz determined that Mattel’s first cinematic outing should focus on the company’s crown jewel: Barbie. Just four weeks into his tenure as CEO, he requested a meeting with Margot Robbie, who he thought would be a perfect ambassador for the brand.
Read More: Meet the Man Who’s Making Barbie a Hollywood Star
It turned out that Robbie was as eager to meet with Mattel as the company was to court her. She thought Barbie would make sense for her production company LuckyChap. “We were kind of keeping tabs on the property for awhile before there was an opening, and then we could jump in and say, ‘We’d like to produce this. Here’s how we would do it and who we would want to do it with,'” she says, “i.e someone like Greta—Greta being the top of the list, pie in the sky, dream person.”
Building Barbie’s world from the ground up
And then there was the creation of this Barbie, a process that wound up taking five years. The biggest challenge was dreaming up the right story. “She doesn’t have a set narrative. I’ve played characters where there’s source material, comic books or if it’s a real person, archival footage,” says Robbie. “Even with fictional characters, there’s a story you end up rooting it in.” Barbie, by contrast, has no personality by design. The idea is for little kids to project jobs and stories onto a blank canvas. So Gerwig and Baumbach had to build not just a character, but a story, and an entire world from scratch.
Read More: How Greta Gerwig Is Leading By Example
“Before Greta, we did hear many pitches,” says Brenner. “I don’t want to call them generic because that wouldn’t be fair. They were all interesting in their own right. But it was sort of predictable. You’re thinking, ‘That’s not enough. We needed to live up to the legacy and the complexity.'”
What Gerwig has conjured up is certainly complex. She has fulfilled the presumed corporate mandate: Make a fun summer romp. But the film is stuffed with Gerwig’s idiosyncrasies, from dance numbers inspired by Old Hollywood to Gerwig’s personal preoccupation with stories about complicated mother-daughter relationships. Whether fans flock to Barbie will likely determine the fate of Mattel’s future film endeavors. Kreiz hopes the movie will make a splash and put Mattel Films on the map: “We’re looking to create movies that become cultural events.”
Correction, June 29
The original version of this story misstated the status of Mattel’s upcoming film slate. They have 15 movies announced, not greenlit. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 81 | https://www.dignityfunerals.co.uk/arranging-a-funeral/planning-a-funeral/funeral-music/ | en | Popular Songs for Funerals | [
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] | null | [] | 2020-12-10T00:00:00 | We have created a list of the most popular funeral songs, from classic funeral music to meaningful contemporary songs. | en | https://assets.dignityfunerals.co.uk/media/4778/dignity-favicon-01.ico | Dignity Funerals | https://www.dignityfunerals.co.uk/arranging-a-funeral/planning-a-funeral/funeral-music/ | Funeral Music
Choosing the right music and songs for your loved one’s funeral will personalise the service and truly pay tribute to their life in a lasting way. We have created a list of the most popular funeral songs to help you decide what music to play at a funeral; from classical funeral music to modern day pop songs.
This guide covers:
Popular funeral songs
Classical funeral music
Modern funeral songs
Funeral music ideas
Funeral songs for mum
Funeral songs for dad
Funeral songs for nan
Funeral songs for grandad
Uplifting funeral songs
Things to consider when choosing funeral music
Popular funeral songs
When arranging a funeral, you have full control over what music you’d like to play. You may prefer uplifting and happy funeral songs, or maybe some classical funeral music.
As funerals become more tailored to reflect the life of the person who has sadly passed away, families are opting for modern songs to be played at the service.
Here are some of the most popular funeral songs:
My Way – Frank Sinatra
Angels – Robbie Williams
The Best – Tina Turner
Wind Beneath My Wings – Bette Midler
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – Eric Idle (Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’)
Time to Say Goodbye – Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli
You’ll Never Walk Alone – Gerry and the Pacemakers
Classical funeral music
Classical music remains a popular choice for funerals, setting the stage for an emotional and moving service. Many people opt for light classical music for funerals, whilst others may prefer a more dramatic piece which reflects the personality of their loved one.
Some of the most popular classical music for funerals include:
Canon in D – Paachelbel
Nimrod from Enigma Variations – Elgar
The Four Seasons – Vivaldi
Ave Maria – Schubert
Pie Jesu – Fauré
Adagio – Albinoni
Air on a G String – Bach
Modern funeral songs
Your loved one’s funeral song can be anything of your choice, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a popular or classic song. The funeral music should reflect the way they lived their life or a song that may have been special to them. Here are a few modern funeral songs that you may want to consider.
Some of the most modern songs for funerals include:
Halo – Beyonce
Wonderwall – Oasis
Someone like you – Adele
When September Ends – Green Day
I’ll Be Missing You – Puff Daddy & Faith Evans
Someone You Loved – Lewis Capaldi
Lay Me Down – Sam Smith
Funeral music ideas
If you’re not sure which songs to play at a funeral service, take a look at the suggestions below. If you would prefer contemporary and uplifting funeral music or beautiful, classical music for a funeral, choose your favourite from our list.
Funeral songs for mum
When arranging a funeral for your mother, you will have the choice of the funeral songs or music that will be played during the service. Here’s a list of funeral songs, which are fitting when saying goodbye to a loving mother.
Popular songs for a mother’s funeral include:
In the Arms of an Angel - Sarah McLachlan
You’re My Best Friend - Queen
Supermarket flowers – Ed Sheeran
Goodbye’s the Saddest Word – Celine Dion
Mama – Il Divo
Don’t Forget to Remember Me – Carrie Underwood
I’ll Always Love My Mamma – The Intruders
In My Life – The Beatles
Momma, I’m Coming Home – Ozzy Osbourne
Unforgettable – Nat King Cole
Funeral songs for dad
When organising a funeral for your father, there are several things you need to consider. One of those is the choice of funeral songs; it could be his favourite song, or something a bit more comforting. We have compiled a list of funeral songs that are appropriate for the funeral of a father.
Popular songs for a father’s funeral include:
You Raise Me Up – Josh Groban
Dance With My Father – Luther Vandross
The Living years – Mike & The Mechanics
My Father’s Eyes – Eric Clapton
Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own – U2
Hero – Mariah Carey
Fathers and Daughters – Michael Bolton
Song for Dad – Keith Urban
Thank You for Being Dad – Jon Barker
Funeral songs for nan
When picking funeral music for your grandma’s funeral, you should consider picking their favourite song or the song that reminds you of them. The most important thing is that it’s special to you, her and the rest of the family. We’ve put together a list of funeral songs that are suitable for your nan’s funeral.
Popular songs for a grandma’s funeral include:
Nan’s Song – Robbie Williams
Grandma’s Song – Gail Davies
Grandma’s Feather Bed – John Denver
Smile – Nat King Cole
Amazing Grace – John Newton
Grandma’s Hands – Bill Withers
Funeral songs for grandad
When thinking about a funeral song for your grandad, you should think about his favourites or songs that remind you and friends and family of him. We have created a list of funeral songs to help you choose or to give you ideas.
Popular songs for a grandad's funeral include:
Heaven Was Needing a Hero – Jo Dee Messina
Fix You – Coldplay
Grandpa – Justin Moore
What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong
Uplifting songs to play at a funeral
Many people have traditionally believed a funeral should be a serious and sombre occasion. Now, more and more people are breaking the mould by opting for a funeral service that is a celebration of their loved one's life. For those ceremonies, uplifting funeral songs can help bring comfort to family and friends, and may even raise a smile.
Examples of happy and uplifting songs to play at a funeral include:
Three Little Birds – Bob Marley and the Wailers
Somewhere Over The Rainbow - Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong
Spirit in the Sky – Norman Greenbaum
See You Again – Wiz Khalifa
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough – Marvin Gaye
Don’t Worry, Be Happy – Bobby McFerrin
Things to consider when choosing funeral music
Almost any piece of music can be played at the funeral as long as copyright restrictions do not apply. Commonly, people choose hymns for funerals or play a CD of a favourite song or piece of classical music.
Many crematoria have a full digital music library available to choose from. Please contact your local Dignity Funeral Director to discuss your wishes or preferences. It is also advisable to speak to whomever is leading the ceremony when you are creating a funeral order of service.
Our experts will give you all the support and advice you to make necessary funeral music arrangements. Whether it’s sourcing funeral music or assembling a choir, we will help you every step of the way.
If you've got a particular song or piece of music in mind that you'd like to discuss in more detail, please get in touch with your local Funeral Director today. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 40 | https://blogs.cornell.edu/learning/why-do-we-love-the-movies/ | en | Why Do We Love the Movies? – The Bookshelf | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | https://blogs.cornell.edu/learning/why-do-we-love-the-movies/ | There are few hobbies as popular as watching a movie. Whether you prefer to Netflix and chill or see a film on the big screen, movies have been a large part of our personal and social lives since they were invented. Let us investigate what truly contributes to their appeal.
Part of Our Evolution
Asking why we love entertainment is similar to asking why we love ice cream and pizza. Just like food that is laden with sugar, salt, or fat, entertainment stimulates our most basic neurological hardware. Even when our ancestors were living in caves, they probably entertained themselves and the people around them with drawings and storytelling.
The way entertainment ties in with our cognitive neuroscience may have contributed to how humans have endured so well through the ages. Stories like ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ engaged our innate ability to imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes. This understanding, in turn, helped us respond to our environment in a way that enabled our species to survive.
While gene transfer is limited to once per generation, cultural anecdotes and practices can be transferred multiple times. The influence of entertainment can spread much further and faster than genetic evolution. Therefore, songs, plays, stories, and movies have not only amused us but allowed our species to teach each other how to adapt and thrive.
An Appealing Escape
Entertainment is a way for us to escape an overwhelming world. Watching movies allows us to switch off from the troubles that weigh on our minds and be transported to another reality. A light-hearted movie can make us laugh and feel joy; a romantic movie can alleviate loneliness; an exciting movie can get our adrenalin pumping.
Movies allow us to view the world from a variety of different perspectives. You could be an ant, a mob boss, or a superhero. This bevy of characters ignites our imaginations and opens our minds to infinite possibilities and fantasies. Through watching movies, we can learn about foreign cultures, meet intriguing people, and visit far-flung and exotic places.
Our love for movies is very rarely solely about avoiding real life, though. Most movies commonly have themes that reflect reality. Even disaster or post-apocalyptic movies are fundamentally about the traits that make us human. Hence, our attraction toward movies may not be about leaving reality as much as it is about seeking out a clearer picture of humanity.
Representation & Inspiration
While movies are a fantastic avenue for escapism, they can also provide important representation. The characters and circumstances that movies feature often reflect the general sentiments of society at large. As minority performers are getting more airtime and foreign-language movies are entering the mainstream, the world is turning towards diversity.
When ‘Black Panther’ came out in 2018, its proud and purposeful depiction of African culture was a critical moment in cinema. Black people and women were not cast as villains, hoodlums, sidekicks, or accessories. They were strong, intelligent, kind, and powerful characters—things that are obviously true in real life but not shown enough on screen.
For children and teenagers who were watching and for colored people who had been played down in all aspects of society, this representation was inspiring. The same applies to movies about single mums, gay lovers, struggling immigrants, or unruly retirees. Being seen and centered in an honest and positive light reminds them that they matter too.
Whether we believe that art imitates life or life imitates art, there is no doubt that changes on the big screen are a catalyst for the same in the real world. As our movie screens continue to become more diverse and inclusive, we are given hope that we are building a world where people of color and minority groups are seen, respected, and celebrated.
Fantasies Personified
We love movies so much that performers who star in them are frequently elevated to celebrity status. This is a throwback to primitive times when the actors in mythical stories were thought to retain certain traits of the spirits or deities that they portrayed. Today, we still affix larger-than-life personas to performers and treat them as cultural icons.
The cult of personality is nothing new in human society. Millions of people follow Bigg Boss Tamil to learn about the latest movies and celebrity gossip. The characters that actors play are painstakingly designed to be exceptionally attractive or interestingly flawed. So, it is no wonder that many people idolize the actors, even after the movie is over.
Unless you are bordering on obsession, there are no harmful effects to fandom. In fact, being a fan of a performer can increase your enjoyment of their movies. Many movies become box office hits simply because of the famous actors on the billing. With so much ugliness in life, surely a bit of eye candy should not be begrudged.
Movies are fun. They take us away from our everyday lives and remind us that there is a world out there that is much bigger and more fascinating than we think. Movies can inspire us to heroism or make the mundane magical. And that is why we love them. | |||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 15 | https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/movies-based-on-true-stories | en | 17 Best Movies Based on True Stories to Stream Now - Netflix Tudum | [
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"Allison Picurro"
] | 2024-04-25T19:00:00+00:00 | Stream Scoop, Shirley, Maestro, and more fascinating films based on real life. | en | https://assets.nflxext.com/ffe/siteui/common/icons/nficon2023.ico | Netflix Tudum | https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/movies-based-on-true-stories | Real events have always been some of the most reliable sources of inspiration for directors and writers, which means there’s no shortage of compelling films drawn from accounts about real people and events. Whether you’re in the mood for an exploration of recent history or you’re looking to travel further back in time, there’s a movie out there for you.
There are plenty of options available, but we’ve gone ahead and curated a list of 17 films that are inspired by true stories and are absolutely worth your while. Our list has it all: engrossing portraits of icons, spotlights on unsung figures from the past, and thrilling portrayals of harrowing events.
Dolemite Is My Name
Eddie Murphy’s salute to blaxploitation filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore is a fun and outrageous story of dogged perseverance. Murphy stars as Moore, an aging entertainer who, after years of struggling to make it in Hollywood, begins performing stand-up comedy as a foul-mouthed pimp character named Dolemite. The concept takes off, allowing him to turn his brash routine into an album and then a film career, which Moore approaches with a scrappy, homemade spirit. Look out for the supporting cast, which features Da’Vine Joy Randolph (a few years before her Oscar win) in her breakout film role, Keegan-Michael Key, Wesley Snipes, Mike Epps, Craig Robinson, and more.
Dumb Money
A lot of biographical films look to distant history to tell their stories, but Dumb Money draws inspiration from the very recent past. You might remember the GameStop short squeeze of 2021, which happened at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and saw a lot of everyday working people attempting to get rich based on the financial advice of Keith Gill (played here by Paul Dano). He was a YouTube creator and Reddit user whose social media posts helped drive GameStop stock to dramatic highs, and subsequently sent a group of billionaires into panic mode. Although the energetic Dumb Money moves at a fast clip, it takes time to highlight the amateur investors at its center, and actually understands the extremely online nature of the era it’s depicting.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
Zac Efron got plenty of attention for his wrenching performance in 2023’s The Iron Claw, but he was doing drama long before bulking up to play Kevin Von Erich. In 2019, he did something very different when he starred as Ted Bundy in true crime documentarian Joe Berlinger’s drama based on the life of the serial killer. The narrative tracks Bundy’s meeting and long-term relationship with Liz Kendall (Lily Collins), who believes his claims of innocence even as the law starts to catch on to his trail of murders. If you’re squeamish about depictions of violence but still interested in the story, Extremely Wicked focuses more on the bond between Bundy and Kendall –– and on explaining how Bundy evaded conviction for so long –– than it does on the actual details of his crimes.
The Good Nurse
Adapted from Charles Graeber’s 2013 true crime book, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, this film is an unsettling thriller about serial killer Charles Cullen and the woman who helped bring him down. Jessica Chastain stars as Amy Loughren, a single mother and nurse who begins to suspect that Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), a new colleague who she’s become fast friends with, is complicit in the sudden deaths of several patients. For even more on this story, you can check out the documentary about the police investigation into Cullen, Capturing the Killer Nurse.
Hacksaw Ridge
Andrew Garfield earned his first Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Desmond Doss, a World War II medic and one of only two conscientious objectors to ever be awarded a Medal of Honor. Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist Christian, refused to carry a weapon during the war, and the film tracks how he made it out of the Battle of Okinawa alive without firing a shot. If you came to this list looking for a war film, look no further than Hacksaw Ridge, which boasts sweeping cinematography, battle sequences as riveting as they are horrifying, and scene-stealing supporting performances from Hugo Weaving, Teresa Palmer, and Vince Vaughn.
Harriet
It’s hard to believe it took until 2019 for a major Hollywood feature inspired by the life of Harriet Tubman to be produced. Directed by Kasi Lemmons, Harriet stars Cynthia Erivo as the titular abolitionist, and the film chronicles her escape from slavery through her work to bring scores of slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad. With a layered lead performance from Erivo, and an ensemble that includes Leslie Odom Jr., Janelle Monáe, and Joe Alwyn, Harriet brings one of the most courageous figures in American history to the big screen.
The Irishman
Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Charles Brandt’s 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses remains one of a select group of films to receive 10 nominations at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. The acclaimed epic reunites Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci, following Frank Sheeran (De Niro), a union truck driver who descends into a life of crime when he starts working as a hit man for a mafia family, led by Russell Bufalino (Pesci). Don’t be intimidated by its more than three-hour run time; The Irishman makes every moment worth it by elegantly mapping Sheeran’s fall from grace, from beginning to lonely end.
Lost Girls
Liz Garbus –– who has become best known for her documentaries like What Happened, Miss Simone? and There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane –– directs this chilling drama based on Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, Robert Kolker’s nonfiction book about the murders of young female sex workers on the South Shore of Long Island, New York. Amy Ryan plays Mari Gilbert, a mother who puts pressure on the police to search for her missing daughter. Her advocacy opens up a larger investigation into the case. A suspect was arrested in connection with a number of the Gilgo Beach killings in 2023 (he has pleaded not guilty to four murder charges), and Garbus will probe that development in an upcoming documentary.
Maestro
Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Bradley Cooper directs, co-writes, and stars in this intimate portrait of the complicated yet loving relationship between legendary composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife, Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan). The film follows Bernstein’s rise to prominence, beginning with his conducting debut at 25 years old, and shines light on his numerous affairs with men, as well as his alcohol abuse — all of which caused tension within his marriage. Cooper and Mulligan’s performances anchor Maestro, but the stylistic details are just as important: It’s hard to describe the film’s much-discussed six-minute conducting scene, which Cooper throws himself into with whole-hearted commitment. You just have to see it to believe it.
Moneyball
“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” A line like that could only come from Moneyball, a film that is, in fact, quite romantic about baseball. Directed by Bennett Miller and adapted from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis, the story centers on Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) as he attempts to assemble a strong team of players on a limited budget for the 2002 season. Working alongside recent Yale graduate Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), Beane uses computer-generated analysis to draft undervalued players. Moneyball’s strength is how it manages to turn all of that number crunching into an uplifting tearjerker.
NYAD
Directed by married duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, NYAD dramatizes the experiences of the titular Diana Nyad (Annette Bening), who in 2013 became the first person to complete the 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, at the age of 64. This seemingly impossible feat is Nyad’s lifelong dream, having first attempted the crossing in her twenties, and several decades later she’s spurred into trying it again by her own prickly determination. Though swimming is largely a solitary event, the film stresses how deeply Nyad needed the help of her team, led by her best friend and coach Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster — who, like Bening, earned an Oscar nomination for her performance) and navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans).
Rustin
Rustin earned Colman Domingo his first Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Bayard Rustin, the Black Civil Rights leader who organized the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. (played here by Aml Ameen) delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin’s contributions to the Civil Rights Movement have mostly gone unsung, due in large part to him being openly gay. But the film depicts the fiery and commanding Rustin’s refusal to get knocked down, even as his determination put him at odds with prominent Black leaders like NAACP chief Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock) and Representative Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright).
Scoop
Scoop gives you a behind-the-scenes look at how a shocking royal interview came to be. The film is based on Sam McAlister’s own account of how she managed to book Prince Andrew for his explosive 2019 BBC Newsnight interview, where he was questioned by journalist Emily Maitlis about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Scoop gets into the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the broadcast, with Billie Piper starring as McAlister, Gillian Anderson as Maitlis, and Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew.
Shirley
Two Academy Award winners, John Ridley (screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave) and Regina King, unite for this film that brings Shirley Chisholm’s story to life. King plays Chisholm, a former schoolteacher and Brooklyn native who became the first Black congresswoman and, in 1972, became the first Black candidate to seek a major party’s nomination with her bold and trailblazing run for president. The star-studded supporting cast is filled out by Lance Reddick, Lucas Hedges, André Holland, Terrence Howard, and more.
Society of the Snow
Adapted from Pablo Vierci's 2008 book of the same name, J. A. Bayona’s Spanish-language film tells the harrowing story of the Uruguayan rugby team who, in 1972, became stranded in the Andes mountains after a plane crash. As the men begin to rapidly die due to the harsh conditions, the survivors toy with the impossible idea of resorting to cannibalism to keep themselves alive. What Society of the Snow does so well is focus on the relationships between the survivors, finding the balance between the treacherous conditions and the kindness they show each other.
The Trial of the Chicago 7
In 1969, a group of anti-Vietnam War activists were charged with crossing state lines to incite a riot at the previous year’s Democratic National Convention, and, in 2020, Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed The Trial of the Chicago 7, which is inspired by their story. It’s a history lesson packed into an engaging, and often unbelievable, courtroom drama that highlights just how much power the government has always had over the American justice system. Sorkin’s script is packed with grand speeches and clever quips, giving the film’s sprawling cast (which features Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Mark Rylance, Michael Keaton, Jeremy Strong, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) plenty to sink their teeth into.
The Two Popes
Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce lead this two-hander about the working relationship between two pontiffs during a critical era for the Catholic Church. Set mostly in the wake of the 2012 Vatican leaks scandal, the film finds Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins) and the future Pope Francis I, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pryce), coming together to discuss whether Bergoglio would be a suitable replacement after Benedict resigns. Where Benedict is conservative, Bergoglio is liberal-minded, but they find common ground by discussing their lives, watching television, and bonding over sports. The Two Popes is a comedy about an unlikely friendship, but it’s also a thoughtful examination of faith. |