When I was a teenager, my uncle told me that the person whose death affected him the most in his life was John Lennon. Not his father or his mother, nor a childhood friend. Instead, he mourned for a person he never knew and had little chance of ever having a personal relationship with. When…
A quick one this morning. With Oscar season nearly upon us (the nominations will be announced on Wednesday), it seems like a good time to remind ourselves of the true nature of the Academy and its illustrious awards. The Oscars are an elitist institution, and not just in the obvious ways. Everyone knows the perils…
There’s something about the discussion surrounding Wolf of Wall Street that feels awfully familiar. Wasn’t it around this time last year that we were all fiercely debating the morality of another Oscar hopeful? At that time, it was Zero Dark Thirty’s depiction of torture in the War on Terror that made us choose sides. This…
On this last day of 2013, here is a quick look back at my top posts of the year, listed in order of popularity. If you like these, don’t forget to check out my work at other publications, such as The Atlantic and Movie Mezzanine. Thank you for reading this year and for making Reel Change a…
When parsing the releases of 2013 for the film that best captured the national mood, there is no shortage of contenders. Wolf of Wall Street and its magnetic lunacy captured our complicated relationship with wealth in America. 12 Years a Slave brought us closer to revealing the raw, tender heart of our racial issues than…
There is an old, possibly apocryphal story about a senator who stormed into the White House during the Coolidge Administration to complain that a man under consideration for being nominated to the Senate was “an SOB.” “That could be,” Coolidge reportedly conceded, “but there are a lot of those in the country, and I think…
Key to any discussion about science-fiction movies, including Spike Jonze’s new film Her, is the concept of “singularity,” the predicted moment when human beings will create true artificial intelligence. Writers like Vernon Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have predicted when this moment will occur (Vinge says 2030, while Kurzweil thinks it will be closer to 2045),…
Believe it or not, most Hollywood movies are conservative. I mean conservative in the traditional sense, not in the sense of today’s mainstream Republicans, who helped us rack up a crippling deficit by launching pre-emptive wars. Those aren’t conservative values. Conservatism, in a cultural sense, is about preserving the status quo or making incremental social…
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