Tag: Family

  • Fences

    Fences

    During the 1950s Blacks were continuing the “Northern migration” from the Jim Crow oppression in the south to the northern states. Blacks felt that in the North at least some jobs were available to them without the overt segregation of the South. Those jobs were almost entirely of the menial variety with the understanding that…

  • Lion

    Lion

    Have you as a child been lost — even for 5 or 10 minutes? How about being lost when you were 5 years old? How about being lost at 5 years old and being uneducated — not even knowing your address nor the name of your home town? How about becoming lost riding on a…

  • Remember the Night

    Remember the Night

    Anyone who tries to write comedies for the screen will inevitably spend some amount of time hating Preston Sturges. The man was actually a hen who squeezed out golden eggs with enviable regularity: Sullivan’s Travels, Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Unfaithfully Yours. “You can’t replace someone like Sturges,” reminisced director, writer, and…

  • Life, Animated

    Life, Animated

    Almost everyone has a history with Disney animated movies, especially those of us who profess to be film junkies. We weren’t taking the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorcese as children. Instead, we were covering our faces with blankets as Bambi and his mother ran from hunters or when Scar pushed Mufasa into a…

  • Genius

    Genius

    There is a tendency, in this human nature of ours, to distill a thing into what we consider its most fundamental. Sex becomes pleasure, knowledge becomes a recitation of facts, culture becomes equitable with skin color. These derivations all seem essential in some ways, but, through this distillation, we lose the whole and are left…

  • Copperhead

    Copperhead

    For the most part we in the Northern states look upon the Civil War as a tragic but noble and necessary episode to preserve the Union. And most of us rank Abraham Lincoln as one of the greatest, if not the greatest of U.S. presidents. But we gloss over how much opposition to the war…

  • The Boy and the Beast

    The Boy and the Beast

    American animated films tend to be formulaic slapstick. Of course this is Disney’s fault, but it’s also because we consider cartoons to be “for children,” therefore they must be easy to grasp and funny and sentimental. I would argue American animation labors under the same existential curse most adolescent entertainment does: sarcasm and narcissism disguised as a…

  • Inside Out

    Inside Out

    While Hollywood relentlessly seeks its next billion dollar tentpole – a Ghostbusters UNIVERSE? – maybe MIB meets 21 Jump Street? Oh, so Wasp is in Phase 3? – Pixar’s approach and process can now be deemed innovation: meticulously crafting films, characters, and stories on an aggressively slow timeline, collaboratively, with a widely-shared and admired approach…