Tag: Racism

  • Wind River

    Wind River

    In​ ​the​ ​past​ ​two​ ​years,​ ​actor​ ​Taylor​ ​Sheridan​ ​has​ ​quickly​ ​fashioned​ ​a​ ​new​ ​role​ ​for​ ​himself​ ​in Hollywood.​ A​ ​man​ ​known​ ​mostly​ ​for​ ​his​ ​work​ ​in​ ​police​ ​procedurals​ ​and​ ​Sons​ ​of​ ​Anarchy​ ​is​ ​now California’s​ ​cowboy​ ​auteur,​ ​a​ ​voice​ ​steeped​ ​in​ ​the​ ​bygone​ ​era​ ​of​ ​the​ ​classic​ ​Western. I​ ​bring​ ​that​ ​up​ ​not​ ​because​ ​Sheridan’s​…

  • Detroit

    Detroit

    2010 was the year of Kathryn Bigelow. She became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director and her breakout indie The Hurt Locker scored a surprise win for Best Picture. The film, about a bomb defusing team in Iraq, is a master-class in tension and a gripping character study to boot. Bigelow…

  • Traverse City Film Festival 2017 Wrap Up

    Traverse City Film Festival 2017 Wrap Up

    [Ed. It has been a pleasure to follow Ron’s exhausting coverage of the festival. We’re blessed to have him on the team! A quick note: all feature photos were used from the official Traverse City Film Festival Flickr account which has 1000s of beautiful images of the event over the years. All copyrights belong to their…

  • The Landlord

    The Landlord

    “If you didn’t sweat so much nobody’d take you for a landlord,” Fanny (Diana Sands) tells Elgar (Beau Bridges). “You could pass for a human being.” Actually, The Landlord does pass for a human being, in how it says one thing, means another, thinks another, but all with a body language that doesn’t require translation.…

  • Get Out

    Get Out

    Jordan Peele is best known for his comedy work on Mad TV and Key and Peele, but for his feature film debut he chose a decidedly different path. Get Out is not only a horror film, it’s a horror film about racism. The opening scene sets the tone: a black man walks nervously along the…

  • True/False Film Festival 2017 Day 4

    True/False Film Festival 2017 Day 4

    It seems like every year I’m sitting in one of the two biggest venues in Columbia looking to a friend and lamenting the end of the True/False Film Festival. During no other weekend does this city shine so bright and love so fiercely. The heartland of America takes on a new vitality each year during…

  • True/False Film Festival 2017 Day 3

    True/False Film Festival 2017 Day 3

    It always takes me a day or two to adjust to a film festival schedule: wake up early to sit in a theater; cram meals in during short breaks; stay late at Q&A sessions; then go to bed even later writing about what you saw. Unfortunately, I’m usually only adjusted during the third and fourth…

  • Hidden Figures

    Hidden Figures

    When I was a child the science museum in my hometown hosted a traveling exhibit featuring all kinds of information about the moon, the U.S. space program, and even some samples of lunar rock (which is less interesting to look at when you’re ten-years-old than it sounds). To prepare for our field trip to the…

  • 13th

    13th

    Social justice advocate and attorney Bryan Stevenson has stated that Americans need to greatly challenge the present narrative on race that has historically informed the way our criminal justice system functions primarily with regard to the imbalanced and disproportionate imprisonment of people of color (particularly males). Stevenson, author of the bestselling nonfiction work A Just…

  • Loving

    Loving

    When I was reared in rural Indiana in the 1950’s, I never saw living (as opposed to pictures) people of color other than on those rare occasions my brothers, sisters, and I piled into our (usually beaten up) car and made the annual (or in a good year, semi-annual) trek into Fort Wayne (50 miles…